I think you're really missing the biggest part here. Your game is likely good because it looks good. It looks like you cared about every aspect, the style is consistent and pleasing, everything looks competently made.
This is the biggest part.
There's a theme here in this subreddit between posts love this and the failed project postmortems that pop up from time to time.
Usually, the failed games look bad, either bad art, bad ui or clear overuse of assets that don't match. Assets aren't bad, but they are if they don't match.
Your game looks great and you marketed well and had a strategy and experience.
You did an awesome job, I'm happy for you and inspired that people may play my game one day if I do it all right.
Don't know why I kinda rambled on here lol
Thanks for the post :)
The hook is great and full 3D games always do best on social media. Add playable animals and people go wild. Combine a good hook and 3D that meets a minimum standard and you’re cooking.
The lighting in this game is doing some real heavy lifting in terms of perceived polish. It’s very well lit. This is a good example of mood building to sell an idea with some key assets and a couple of characters.
Next challenge is making the game really compelling! Good luck on the journey
Man this is my biggest problem. I’m bad at art. I’m bad at colors. So I’m just trying to learn more there. Who woulda fucking thought my journey as a developer would lead me to focusing on my artistry
Yeah same here, I good enough to make some stylized 3d models and rig them, but everything else that goes on top of that is insane.
And then lighting, oh God.
It's never right and as soon as it looks good, it's too dark. Some colors are popping too much and some are flat, idk what to do haha
No, this honestly is first true indie 100k game I’ve seen posted here.
Graphic wise this looks like something that can be mad by a 1 or 2 man team which is awesome 👍
Most of these post with 100k wishlist are from “indie” teams of 15 or more people. What’s nice about this however is I believe instead of having just a super graphically intensive game. I believe what lead to his success what just a masterclass in marketing. 👏👏👏👏
This is the opposite of the lazy dev or programmer only indie game postmortem that we usually see on the thread. Honestly I’m truly impressed by how they navigated the indie game marketing landscape and made some vital moves that ensured there success
Very interesting, thanks for sharing your process - and congrats on the excellent work.
I'm wondering though how relevant all that tracking and outreaching might have been. I'm not saying it was pointless, but it may have amounted to as low as 10-20% boost. My reasoning:
Content creators likely didn't concede to your requests because they felt like being kind, but rather because you came up with a really interesting, engaging, and fresh game concept that you fleshed out with passion, care and attention to detail. I feel that right there may be the secret sauce.
No kidding. Basically the strategy nowadays is to create a highly polished vertical slice or prototype and see what the response is. If it doesn't go viral then move to another project and try again. With so many games releasing it's too risky to create a game (even a great one) and take your chances with the market.
Counterpoint.
I'm making a game that I don't care or need to succeed at the moment.
The plan is to build up a re-usable feature set. I have like 10-15 games I'd like to make. And each one is strategically ordered in a way that I can leverage at least 70-80% of the stuff from the previous game each time.
So even if I fail with 1 game, it was sorta majorly contributing to the next game.
e.g.
* First game won't have inventory. But does have features A, B, C
* 2nd game uses game1 feature A, B, and C but also implements inventory and Feature D
* 3rd game almost all features from 2nd game but does something completely differently.
Making specialized systems is needed sometimes, but there is a lot of general purpose goodness out there.
Having good references and functioning framework is really valuable.
Different studios value that at differently, some more than others.
This is what I'll be doing with future games. I'm finishing a game right now that just hasn't found it's audience, even though quality is decent. Next game is all about early vertical slices + steam page... if no traction. Switch it up or new idea.
I'm not sure this is the right takeaway. Most games that find success do not have a viral tiktok. OP didn't find success because of a viral tiktok, but rather because their game was something that excited people. The success on tiktok was a direct result of them making a game that people wanted to play. They seem to have done a fantastic job marketing, but it would not have worked as well if their game was not so good. Everything really comes down to what game you are making
Maybe this is against the grain, but I’m glad indies now have a legit way to market their games to millions of people without paying a cent or signing with a publisher that takes a huge chunk of your revenue. Does it require more strategic thinking to pull it off? Sure, but at least it’s an option.
I think a lot of devs look back at prior years with rose tinted glasses in terms of how well their game would’ve performed with less competition. There’s no guarantee your game would’ve performed any better back in the 2010’s compared to now. You’d still need an interesting hook, decent art, and serviceable gameplay to get noticed, even in a smaller crowd of games.
I honestly don't see the issue. Many people will tell you to do market research.
This is market research, or a way to do so.
You can still create successful games without it, but will just be more difficult to do so.
There are more people playing indie games but that hasn’t scaled to the same rate as people making games since the market is *much* more saturated with a lot of interest in creating games and all the tools making it more accessible to do
Best time for devs maybe, but that’s because more people are making games, which is honestly awesome. I can’t honestly say I’d prefer there were less awesome games can you?
We're speaking about Devs here aren't we?
I was speaking the best time for Devs...
To be honest I'm not even sure I can speak as a gamer anymore as I don't have time to play as I used to.
I'm playing ff7 remake once I finish my game though
I think the best time is right now. We are in the golden age. The market is rational. Making money is very doable. And you don't need any special connections to get on particular marketplaces. I am going to savor every moment of it. I just wish I could make games faster before it ends. I'm scared an actual indiepocalypse is going to come.
I wish I had your view but how is it doable? You have to keep trying to make something viral on chinese spyware app. I hate that. Back then the market wasn't as populated and it was way easier to be seen. Even a good 2d platformer could make significant amounts of money... I'm one of the lucky ones that managed to find work for a game company the last few years and from what my boss has told me, I stand by the dates I've said. I would have given up game dev forever had I not lucked out with the job. And I believe things are gonna keep getting even harder.
Most of the 10 thousandish games that have grossed over 200k have never gone viral. My game has gross over 3 million and never went viral. Just steam alone does a great job of pushing your game if you can manage to make something people legitimately want to buy when they see it.
3 million??? Wow! What are you doing here instead of relaxing in a pool somewhere?? XD
Even accounting for expenses, with that amount of money in my country you would be living like a king!
Well what can I say? congrats, I'm jealous.
Unfortunately the stuff I want to make are divided like this:
-stuff I can make in a reasonable budget that I would wanna play myself and there may be a few people who will like it, enough for me to gain a little extra money
-stuff that myself and many people would like but need a huge budget and years to develop. I'm just not gonna risk it with those. The exception is my dream game which I hope to make slowly year by year but I'll be doing this more for me than getting rich.
So my goal is to make 1-2 small games a year if I can and supplement my job until I retire. I'm not chasing the golden goose anymore.
EDIT:
I snooped a bit into your profile and found a video you posted about your success. The first comment was this:
[[too long; didn't watch: In order to be successful, they needed:
* Years of industry experience
* Money and a family to support them working full-time for 5 years
* Money to hire contractors for the things they couldn't or didn't want to do
* Willingness to revamp their whole game design when they noticed that it was at odds with their design goals
* A proper marketing strategy, with help of a PR firm]]
I'd say this speaks for itself
> I'd say this speaks for itself
And what does it say? That you need experience, skill, and some capital to start a business?
I guess if one's definition of "golden age" is "free money trees growing everywhere that you need no experience, skill, or capital" then no, it's not a golden age and it never has been.
You absolutely do not have to go viral. Myself and many many others have made millions as an indie without ever once going viral. Most games on steam that have grossed over a million dollars have never gone viral. They're just solid looking titles that people actually want to play.
Isn't that what many of the indie/mobile games publishers are doing? Create some prototype for marketing purposes, evaluate interest, scrap it and back to the drawing board until something gets attention
IMO it's not that much different from needing to "go viral" on something like Steam Greenlight back in the day, or making a strong pitch to a publisher before that. If anything, it's better because we all have more options now. Just another way of looking at things :)
How much of the game did you have finished before you did the first TikToks? Was it basically just "staged" gameplay footage to show what it might look like?
If so, I think that's a really interesting approach. We'd all like to just make our dream game, but sometimes just responding to what the market is telling you is what you need to do if you actually want to find success. And it's a lot faster to iterate through game ideas with the TikTok equivalent of a "landing page" than a full game for sure!
congratas on the numbers! out of curiosity, I believe you are still in the start of development phase. Could it be a problem for your marketing to take too long to release? Thinking about interest going down or something...
With securing wishlists, even if the game launches 3 years from now and a lot of people have forgotten then they will receive an email when it launches or goes on sale. So I think interest can be piqued again.
Congrats on wishlists!
Really like the steam page and capsule art.
I had just watched Chris Zucowski's recent Steam Page tear down and I now check to see if the creator page has been set up, which was great to see yours set up.
Horror games and cute dog games seem to garner interest. Did you set out to make the game in a calculated way by combining and mixing some popular genres, or was the other way around and the game you wanted to make hits on these genres organically?
Best of luck!
thank you for sharing this.
the game concept and marketing strategy is on point .
the first 30 sec of your trailer, only thing I understood was i am a dog in game, which is not ideal, i think it should be more catchy
wish you the best.
Congratulations!
Your planning paid off and you guys put a lot of work into marketing and networking which really paid off. How long were you in development before you started sharing videos on TikTok?
Congratulations! As soon as I saw Haunted Paws I knew it would get popular.
Need more dog games in the world! I'm also making a dog game, [A Corgi's Cozy Hike](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2321250/A_Corgis_Cozy_Hike/), so it's nice to see more.
The game doesnt look amazing.. but it does look GREAT!!!
Keeping in mind that most indie games are hot piles of .. well dog doo-doo... you are missing that big point.
The game is also intriguing and fairly interesting.. its not ground breaking.. but that said.. its STILL a huge leap from the normal horseshit that people call indie games on the store.
Congrats, I hope you do well!
Yeah man I wouldn’t really accredit the virality due to many of the things you’ve listed, I would credit them due to how good your game looks, the concept of It Takes Two with cute doggos in a haunted house setting looks fun. You could’ve done all the things you’ve listed with the VoidPrison game you guys made and it wouldn’t have really helped at all
You guys have something with how this game looks and appeals to a huge crowd lol you got this keep it up
I first saw your game on Instagram. I shared it with my friends because I thought the art and music was cute and juxtaposed interestingly with the creepy stuff which was not TOO spooky! I also liked how the post video was made, cutting between different duos of dogs running from different monsters. It had nice timing and was pleasing to watch.
What I see is that Haunted paws looks 10x more polished and original than Void Prison. And Horror and cute is really popular right now. It's all about how marketable the game is.
wow that's really impressive amount of wishlists especially because in my opinion the game looks bad (sorry don't want to be offensive but just the way i see it), i'm guessing the cute animals, co-op and horror aspect all have a broad appeal. Well done
Not to throw shade because this concept is interesting and you've clearly "succeeded," as far as a person can preemptively tell before launch, but I think that boils down to paying for good art, choosing a relatively novel theme for the genre, and getting lucky with virality.
Because I doubt it was the quality of your trailer or what's been shown of the gameplay. There's basically nothing here that tells the audience why the game might be good; just that there are cute animals. The rest is fairly tame horror elements in an unremarkable package. The logline doesn't match up very well with the tags or the trailer (e.g. "defeat evil creatures," or "action-packed adventure" vs "casual," and "cute"). The promotional materials seem to want to straddle the line in a way that at least makes me *really* wary that the game will feel like it's split too far between two relatively opposed elements.
Again (can't stress this enough), I can't know. But I just want to caution you heavily that these wishlists may not translate to purchases, since the first impression is important for click-throughs, while second impressions are important for purchases. While my first impression is "aww, that's cute," my second impression is, "wait, does this look any fun at all?" Is it a puzzle game? (And are the puzzles uniquely reliant on both players' cooperation?) Is there combat? What are the stakes? The tag says "casual," but what exactly does that mean? Are there meaningful choices, or is it a purely linear experience? Is it more of an experience or a story? Is there any writing in this game, or is it just "your owner is missing"?
Not all of these questions *need* answered, but the audience may be smaller than you think if there's no clear reason to play. Just food for thought. You put in the work, but unless you can show a relatively consistent way to achieve virality, you're basically saying, "here's how you can get a ton of wishlists - all you need to do is go viral!" sincere there are plenty of games with great art that advertise themselves well and still fail.
Thanks for sharing this. I have no doubt that you will have a great launch, I am looking forward to play it with my girlfriend! Do you have any plans to launch on MacOS? and what game engine did you use?
Awesome write up and congrats! I definitely am trying to brainstorm my next hook and look to be more internet media friendly. It's pretty much key today to getting eyes on a project it seems. If only I could figure out how to post to tiktok and why they banned me after I tried lmao (the video was 30 seconds of e10+ rated gameplay)
True, but it can be the difference between "wait for sale" and I need this today. I got a backlog of games and a backlog of wishlists. Give me Another Crabs Treasure (the hook of a cute cartoon crab doing souls stuff, that's ALSO a great game) and it jumped to the front of the line full price, ahead of games that have been out for years. Or a game like Pal world, who's hooks (dark comedy Pokemon almost parody) have moved a whole lot of units despite a bit of jank and iffy originality art wise that would have sunk a boring title (still has the fun factor as a game).
I agree that they started with what people wanted and built media around it. Eventually, they’ll turn it into a game. The point I was trying to make is that having a popular concept first appears to be more important than starting on a game, and hoping it will get picked up at some point, because it’s good.
I think you're really missing the biggest part here. Your game is likely good because it looks good. It looks like you cared about every aspect, the style is consistent and pleasing, everything looks competently made. This is the biggest part. There's a theme here in this subreddit between posts love this and the failed project postmortems that pop up from time to time. Usually, the failed games look bad, either bad art, bad ui or clear overuse of assets that don't match. Assets aren't bad, but they are if they don't match. Your game looks great and you marketed well and had a strategy and experience. You did an awesome job, I'm happy for you and inspired that people may play my game one day if I do it all right. Don't know why I kinda rambled on here lol Thanks for the post :)
Ramble you did not, I 100% agree.
The hook is great and full 3D games always do best on social media. Add playable animals and people go wild. Combine a good hook and 3D that meets a minimum standard and you’re cooking. The lighting in this game is doing some real heavy lifting in terms of perceived polish. It’s very well lit. This is a good example of mood building to sell an idea with some key assets and a couple of characters. Next challenge is making the game really compelling! Good luck on the journey
Man this is my biggest problem. I’m bad at art. I’m bad at colors. So I’m just trying to learn more there. Who woulda fucking thought my journey as a developer would lead me to focusing on my artistry
Yeah same here, I good enough to make some stylized 3d models and rig them, but everything else that goes on top of that is insane. And then lighting, oh God. It's never right and as soon as it looks good, it's too dark. Some colors are popping too much and some are flat, idk what to do haha
I have a question. How long was the development and how much experience your team has?
wow, im blown away. I look at your page and would never guess you had so many wishlists. Well done!
That sounds funnily enough like a dig at the game
No, this honestly is first true indie 100k game I’ve seen posted here. Graphic wise this looks like something that can be mad by a 1 or 2 man team which is awesome 👍 Most of these post with 100k wishlist are from “indie” teams of 15 or more people. What’s nice about this however is I believe instead of having just a super graphically intensive game. I believe what lead to his success what just a masterclass in marketing. 👏👏👏👏 This is the opposite of the lazy dev or programmer only indie game postmortem that we usually see on the thread. Honestly I’m truly impressed by how they navigated the indie game marketing landscape and made some vital moves that ensured there success
Not saying the game is bad, just that it is 100K wishlist mind blowingly good to me.
Well to it doesn't look like 100K wishlist game to me, like nothing wow or amazing, so I feel like they did an amazing job getting that reach.
Thank you!
Very interesting, thanks for sharing your process - and congrats on the excellent work. I'm wondering though how relevant all that tracking and outreaching might have been. I'm not saying it was pointless, but it may have amounted to as low as 10-20% boost. My reasoning: Content creators likely didn't concede to your requests because they felt like being kind, but rather because you came up with a really interesting, engaging, and fresh game concept that you fleshed out with passion, care and attention to detail. I feel that right there may be the secret sauce.
I don't like that we live in a world where you have to go viral on tiktok to have a successful video game, but you played it well! Congratulations!
No kidding. Basically the strategy nowadays is to create a highly polished vertical slice or prototype and see what the response is. If it doesn't go viral then move to another project and try again. With so many games releasing it's too risky to create a game (even a great one) and take your chances with the market.
Counterpoint. I'm making a game that I don't care or need to succeed at the moment. The plan is to build up a re-usable feature set. I have like 10-15 games I'd like to make. And each one is strategically ordered in a way that I can leverage at least 70-80% of the stuff from the previous game each time. So even if I fail with 1 game, it was sorta majorly contributing to the next game. e.g. * First game won't have inventory. But does have features A, B, C * 2nd game uses game1 feature A, B, and C but also implements inventory and Feature D * 3rd game almost all features from 2nd game but does something completely differently. Making specialized systems is needed sometimes, but there is a lot of general purpose goodness out there. Having good references and functioning framework is really valuable. Different studios value that at differently, some more than others.
This is the way. Keep up the good work!
This is what I'll be doing with future games. I'm finishing a game right now that just hasn't found it's audience, even though quality is decent. Next game is all about early vertical slices + steam page... if no traction. Switch it up or new idea.
I'm not sure this is the right takeaway. Most games that find success do not have a viral tiktok. OP didn't find success because of a viral tiktok, but rather because their game was something that excited people. The success on tiktok was a direct result of them making a game that people wanted to play. They seem to have done a fantastic job marketing, but it would not have worked as well if their game was not so good. Everything really comes down to what game you are making
Maybe this is against the grain, but I’m glad indies now have a legit way to market their games to millions of people without paying a cent or signing with a publisher that takes a huge chunk of your revenue. Does it require more strategic thinking to pull it off? Sure, but at least it’s an option. I think a lot of devs look back at prior years with rose tinted glasses in terms of how well their game would’ve performed with less competition. There’s no guarantee your game would’ve performed any better back in the 2010’s compared to now. You’d still need an interesting hook, decent art, and serviceable gameplay to get noticed, even in a smaller crowd of games.
You don't have to go viral on TikTok to have a successful video game, lol.
Yeah that's like 1 out of a hundred success stories. People forget that games succeed because they are their own marketing.
I honestly don't see the issue. Many people will tell you to do market research. This is market research, or a way to do so. You can still create successful games without it, but will just be more difficult to do so.
What is your ideal world then? The power for indies to be ultra successful is higher than it has ever been.
There are more people playing indie games but that hasn’t scaled to the same rate as people making games since the market is *much* more saturated with a lot of interest in creating games and all the tools making it more accessible to do
Are you kidding? It's worse than ever! Best time for indie games would be around 2012-2016.
Best time for devs maybe, but that’s because more people are making games, which is honestly awesome. I can’t honestly say I’d prefer there were less awesome games can you?
We're speaking about Devs here aren't we? I was speaking the best time for Devs... To be honest I'm not even sure I can speak as a gamer anymore as I don't have time to play as I used to. I'm playing ff7 remake once I finish my game though
I think the best time is right now. We are in the golden age. The market is rational. Making money is very doable. And you don't need any special connections to get on particular marketplaces. I am going to savor every moment of it. I just wish I could make games faster before it ends. I'm scared an actual indiepocalypse is going to come.
>I just wish I could make games faster before it ends. god I feel this so hard
I wish I had your view but how is it doable? You have to keep trying to make something viral on chinese spyware app. I hate that. Back then the market wasn't as populated and it was way easier to be seen. Even a good 2d platformer could make significant amounts of money... I'm one of the lucky ones that managed to find work for a game company the last few years and from what my boss has told me, I stand by the dates I've said. I would have given up game dev forever had I not lucked out with the job. And I believe things are gonna keep getting even harder.
Most of the 10 thousandish games that have grossed over 200k have never gone viral. My game has gross over 3 million and never went viral. Just steam alone does a great job of pushing your game if you can manage to make something people legitimately want to buy when they see it.
3 million??? Wow! What are you doing here instead of relaxing in a pool somewhere?? XD Even accounting for expenses, with that amount of money in my country you would be living like a king! Well what can I say? congrats, I'm jealous. Unfortunately the stuff I want to make are divided like this: -stuff I can make in a reasonable budget that I would wanna play myself and there may be a few people who will like it, enough for me to gain a little extra money -stuff that myself and many people would like but need a huge budget and years to develop. I'm just not gonna risk it with those. The exception is my dream game which I hope to make slowly year by year but I'll be doing this more for me than getting rich. So my goal is to make 1-2 small games a year if I can and supplement my job until I retire. I'm not chasing the golden goose anymore. EDIT: I snooped a bit into your profile and found a video you posted about your success. The first comment was this: [[too long; didn't watch: In order to be successful, they needed: * Years of industry experience * Money and a family to support them working full-time for 5 years * Money to hire contractors for the things they couldn't or didn't want to do * Willingness to revamp their whole game design when they noticed that it was at odds with their design goals * A proper marketing strategy, with help of a PR firm]] I'd say this speaks for itself
> I'd say this speaks for itself And what does it say? That you need experience, skill, and some capital to start a business? I guess if one's definition of "golden age" is "free money trees growing everywhere that you need no experience, skill, or capital" then no, it's not a golden age and it never has been.
You absolutely do not have to go viral. Myself and many many others have made millions as an indie without ever once going viral. Most games on steam that have grossed over a million dollars have never gone viral. They're just solid looking titles that people actually want to play.
Isn't that what many of the indie/mobile games publishers are doing? Create some prototype for marketing purposes, evaluate interest, scrap it and back to the drawing board until something gets attention
IMO it's not that much different from needing to "go viral" on something like Steam Greenlight back in the day, or making a strong pitch to a publisher before that. If anything, it's better because we all have more options now. Just another way of looking at things :)
How much of the game did you have finished before you did the first TikToks? Was it basically just "staged" gameplay footage to show what it might look like? If so, I think that's a really interesting approach. We'd all like to just make our dream game, but sometimes just responding to what the market is telling you is what you need to do if you actually want to find success. And it's a lot faster to iterate through game ideas with the TikTok equivalent of a "landing page" than a full game for sure!
congratas on the numbers! out of curiosity, I believe you are still in the start of development phase. Could it be a problem for your marketing to take too long to release? Thinking about interest going down or something...
With securing wishlists, even if the game launches 3 years from now and a lot of people have forgotten then they will receive an email when it launches or goes on sale. So I think interest can be piqued again.
You should check your German shop description. It sounds AI translated. ;)
Congrats on wishlists! Really like the steam page and capsule art. I had just watched Chris Zucowski's recent Steam Page tear down and I now check to see if the creator page has been set up, which was great to see yours set up. Horror games and cute dog games seem to garner interest. Did you set out to make the game in a calculated way by combining and mixing some popular genres, or was the other way around and the game you wanted to make hits on these genres organically? Best of luck!
the animations were clean, the art is good, the trailers looked like a game deserving of success, so well done
thank you for sharing this. the game concept and marketing strategy is on point . the first 30 sec of your trailer, only thing I understood was i am a dog in game, which is not ideal, i think it should be more catchy wish you the best.
Thank you for the advice!
Congratulations! Your planning paid off and you guys put a lot of work into marketing and networking which really paid off. How long were you in development before you started sharing videos on TikTok?
Wow! I remember playing Void Prison during Ludum Dare! That was such a fun title, it is great to see how much you guys have improved! Congrats!!!
Capsule art slaps
One question tho. At which point did you open your steam page? Was it before going viral on tiktok or after?
The game looks great and also unique in the coop-horror genre.
Congratulations! As soon as I saw Haunted Paws I knew it would get popular. Need more dog games in the world! I'm also making a dog game, [A Corgi's Cozy Hike](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2321250/A_Corgis_Cozy_Hike/), so it's nice to see more.
What’s with the horror games lately? It’s like the bullet hell fad. One game hits and all of a sudden no other genres exist. Yawn
The game doesnt look amazing.. but it does look GREAT!!! Keeping in mind that most indie games are hot piles of .. well dog doo-doo... you are missing that big point. The game is also intriguing and fairly interesting.. its not ground breaking.. but that said.. its STILL a huge leap from the normal horseshit that people call indie games on the store. Congrats, I hope you do well!
Yeah man I wouldn’t really accredit the virality due to many of the things you’ve listed, I would credit them due to how good your game looks, the concept of It Takes Two with cute doggos in a haunted house setting looks fun. You could’ve done all the things you’ve listed with the VoidPrison game you guys made and it wouldn’t have really helped at all You guys have something with how this game looks and appeals to a huge crowd lol you got this keep it up
Sveiki Lietuviai :D. What is your steam page ctr?
I first saw your game on Instagram. I shared it with my friends because I thought the art and music was cute and juxtaposed interestingly with the creepy stuff which was not TOO spooky! I also liked how the post video was made, cutting between different duos of dogs running from different monsters. It had nice timing and was pleasing to watch.
What I see is that Haunted paws looks 10x more polished and original than Void Prison. And Horror and cute is really popular right now. It's all about how marketable the game is.
wow that's really impressive amount of wishlists especially because in my opinion the game looks bad (sorry don't want to be offensive but just the way i see it), i'm guessing the cute animals, co-op and horror aspect all have a broad appeal. Well done
Not to throw shade because this concept is interesting and you've clearly "succeeded," as far as a person can preemptively tell before launch, but I think that boils down to paying for good art, choosing a relatively novel theme for the genre, and getting lucky with virality. Because I doubt it was the quality of your trailer or what's been shown of the gameplay. There's basically nothing here that tells the audience why the game might be good; just that there are cute animals. The rest is fairly tame horror elements in an unremarkable package. The logline doesn't match up very well with the tags or the trailer (e.g. "defeat evil creatures," or "action-packed adventure" vs "casual," and "cute"). The promotional materials seem to want to straddle the line in a way that at least makes me *really* wary that the game will feel like it's split too far between two relatively opposed elements. Again (can't stress this enough), I can't know. But I just want to caution you heavily that these wishlists may not translate to purchases, since the first impression is important for click-throughs, while second impressions are important for purchases. While my first impression is "aww, that's cute," my second impression is, "wait, does this look any fun at all?" Is it a puzzle game? (And are the puzzles uniquely reliant on both players' cooperation?) Is there combat? What are the stakes? The tag says "casual," but what exactly does that mean? Are there meaningful choices, or is it a purely linear experience? Is it more of an experience or a story? Is there any writing in this game, or is it just "your owner is missing"? Not all of these questions *need* answered, but the audience may be smaller than you think if there's no clear reason to play. Just food for thought. You put in the work, but unless you can show a relatively consistent way to achieve virality, you're basically saying, "here's how you can get a ton of wishlists - all you need to do is go viral!" sincere there are plenty of games with great art that advertise themselves well and still fail.
Impressive, very nice.
Thank you!
Thanks for sharing this. I have no doubt that you will have a great launch, I am looking forward to play it with my girlfriend! Do you have any plans to launch on MacOS? and what game engine did you use?
Thank you! Yes we plan to make this game available on MacOS. We are using Unity
>coop horror >dog hitting all the notes!
Successful prototype. Successful marketing. Successful end product. Seems like you did every major aspect right. Good job!
Awesome write up and congrats! I definitely am trying to brainstorm my next hook and look to be more internet media friendly. It's pretty much key today to getting eyes on a project it seems. If only I could figure out how to post to tiktok and why they banned me after I tried lmao (the video was 30 seconds of e10+ rated gameplay)
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True, but it can be the difference between "wait for sale" and I need this today. I got a backlog of games and a backlog of wishlists. Give me Another Crabs Treasure (the hook of a cute cartoon crab doing souls stuff, that's ALSO a great game) and it jumped to the front of the line full price, ahead of games that have been out for years. Or a game like Pal world, who's hooks (dark comedy Pokemon almost parody) have moved a whole lot of units despite a bit of jank and iffy originality art wise that would have sunk a boring title (still has the fun factor as a game).
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I agree that they started with what people wanted and built media around it. Eventually, they’ll turn it into a game. The point I was trying to make is that having a popular concept first appears to be more important than starting on a game, and hoping it will get picked up at some point, because it’s good.
good shit bro