Board 8 > How little developer publish its own game like us?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Hey everyone. I'm a developer for a little company who's trying to get our games out there, and we've started making some promotional videos and media to try to accomplish this. Previously we relied on a publisher, but are trying to get ourselves more familiar with these things ourselves.

Our newest game is called Ever Forward.
It's about a girl named Maya, who is lost in a (dream) world, and must overcome challenges and trials.

We've put together a teaser video to promote it, though I'm curious what people think about it.
Does it flow well?
Is it grabbing?
Is it enough to make people get any idea of what could be going on?
What do people think would help make the video more attractive and understandable overall.
Let me know what you think about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hERmokoAZoA

Tag

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Pathea was the same developer for My Time at Portia right? I really enjoyed that game.

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Seems like it gives me a good idea of what to expect from the game. As far as game teasers go, I'd say it's pretty good though it the teaser itself feels a little formulaic in the structure (not that that's necessarily a bad thing!)

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Make a post about it on reddit. I see posts on there all the time from indie game developers that blow up and reach the front page of r/gaming with a catchy trailer. The production values here seem good enough that people will view it as a legitimate game. If you've developed and shared any kind of product in the past then I probably don't need to warn you to be ready for a lot of criticism. Especially without the shield of the publisher between yourself and the consumers.

You need to put your own product out there and advertise. This is a huge pain in the ass if you don't have some kind of social media manager at your disposal to handle this kind of thing. You will be reading the comments, including the negative ones, and you need to be aware of how to respond to them so that it doesn't hurt your image -- and when to ignore them.

I respond to feedback a lot, especially to the negative comments, and often end up thanking them for drawing my attention to issues and helping me contextualize what I should be giving priority in the development cycle. It's something that I've gotten some positive responses from in the past and, at least so far, I've never had a situation where an initially negative player went off the rails and declared war on me.

Lastly, from personal experience, I would suggest making sure that your first big post is made at a time when you are READY for people to see what you have to show. It's hard to define this moment but I know that I've released something early before and I noticed that it seemed to impact the overall growth of the product.

I got 2/3 of my traffic, views, and feedback within the first week. After this, things slowed down immensely. I was getting fewer views over a longer period of time and it was killing me to know that more people saw the game in its unfinished beta state. I thought that quality of life and other updates would draw more attention but those updates were overlooked to an extent because people who were interested had already looked at it.

If I could go back and do it again I think I would have waited longer on the initial release.

With all of this information in mind I do honestly worry a little bit about the trailer. The concept for the game seems somewhat interesting but it doesn't jump out to me as something that will capture the attention of a fast moving, high userbase platform like reddit. The indie trailers that blow up there tend to be something with an inherently comical premise, or fast and flashy visuals. This has neither. Your goal of course should be to make the game that you WANT to make, not to make the game that is going to impress people on reddit. But I can say that a more cinematic trailer might appeal to viewers more in a marketing sense.

Hope that information is helpful.

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Tag

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Contact Limited Run Games. Even if you dont want to go the physical game route they are known to help share news about tons of upcoming smaller games to help small devs out. They have a decent sized audience of fans so even a simple tweet from them about your game could gather quite a few new fans. Reach out to Doug or Adrian

I came in prepared to be harsh about the trailer, but it looks good.

That said the feeling I got from it was atmospheric walking simulater with busywork, which is a genre that I'm not a big fan of.

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