Independent developer sharing: how to get 25000 player wish list in steam in two weeks?

Game video and game live broadcasting have long been one of the indispensable marketing channels for many products, and even many popular products are due to the promotion of anchors. However, for plot oriented games, especially interactive novel games, live broadcasting or game videos can easily lead to spoilers, making consumers who originally wanted to buy Games "cloud players".

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However, if handled properly, live game broadcasting can also bring twice the result with half the effort to narrative games. Recently, Tony Howard arias, an independent developer, wrote an article pointing out that slay the princess, the second game of his studio black tabby games, won 25000 wish lists in two weeks, and promoted the sales of old games and the rapid growth of community numbers.

 

According to gamelook, the production of the demo of "kill the princess" took less than 3 weeks. After its release, the sales and wish list of the team's first game "scarlet hollow" increased by as much as 5 times!

Horror visual novel game: the undead Princess and the unpredictable ending

 

Unlike many plot oriented games, the setting, plot and character description of "kill the princess" (Demo) are very simple. Even the beginning of the story seems very hasty: you are on a road in the woods. At the end of the road is a cabin. There is a princess in the basement of the cabin. You are not here to save the princess, but to kill her. If you don't do this, the world will be destroyed

 

After the unidentified protagonist enters the game, the narrator will guide you to pick up a dagger, go into the basement, and assassinate the princess. At the same time, the game will provide many options, such as why the world will end? Isn't it good to kill the princess? Why didn't someone else do it?

 

Each choice will trigger different conversations and actions. What is more interesting is that the narrator will always try to guide the player to kill the princess, and the locked princess will make you wonder whether it is right or wrong to do so.

 

Without exception, you still know nothing about a lot of information, such as the identity of the princess, why she is locked in the basement, and where she is

 

However, this does not affect the progress of the plot. According to different dialogue choices, you can encounter many different situations. Although it is a demo, many anchors have explored seven endings of the game. In order to avoid spoilers, interested readers can move to steam (free) experience.

 

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The following is the full blog content compiled by gamelook:

 

 

I am one of the two developers of black tabby games. This is an independent game studio run by my wife Abby Howard. Some people may have heard of our first game scarlet valley. Recently, we announced our second game, which is also the theme of today's sharing, "killing the princess".

 

 

Scarlet Valley is a horror visual novel. We started the research and development of this seven episode game in March 2020, released the first chapters for free at the end of September of the same year, and successfully logged in to the KickStarter crowdfunding platform the next month.

 

Although we initially planned to release the remaining chapters to the free version page of the steam platform in the form of DLC, in order to simplify and better optimize the predictability of sales activities on steam, we finally decided to switch to the early access mode. Fortunately, this choice paid off, and scarlet Valley performed very well.

 

As of the time of writing this article, we have released the first three episodes of the planned seven episodes, and the fourth episode will be released this fall. This undoubtedly leads to a question: why do you do the second game at the same time?

In essence, the design of killing the princess aims to seamlessly integrate into the workflow of scarlet Valley, which can not only effectively use my time, but also minimize the requirements for Abby's time input:

 

 

1. The story relies on a single character (at least in terms of physical presentation) and a single place, which minimizes the breadth and complexity of art we need without reducing the quality;

 

 

2. We adopted the artistic style created by Abby for scarlet Valley and stripped it to the most basic elements. Every art resource in killing the princess is drawn with pencil instead of ink, which greatly reduces the creation time. Moreover, the game is monochromatic, so coloring is not a problem. In addition, we also decided to reduce the paper size of this project: scarlet Valley is painted on 18 inch by 24 inch paper, while killing the princess is painted on 11 inch by 17 inch paper;

 

 

3. The smaller project scale means that I can write this game quickly, keeping pace with Abby's work on the first draft of the scarlet Valley project. This also adds an effect to kill the princess, that is, it is easy to be mentioned. Although scarlet Valley is very complex, the core premise of kill the princess can be summarized in one sentence.