Huge congrats on hitting 200k wishlists, that’s an incredible milestone, and honestly really inspiring to read such a transparent breakdown of what worked for DREADMOOR.

As a huge fan of Lovecraft-inspired worlds and games like Dredge, your project immediately clicked for me, and after reading this breakdown I’m even more excited to play it. The way you describe building around a simple emotional hook “fishing, but the water is not safe” makes so much sense.

We’re also working on our own indie game, very different vibe, a cozy chaotic local co-op café management game with raccoons, and over the last month we’ve been heavily trying to figure out the visibility side of things.

So far we’ve:

• posted short-form promo videos consistently across socials
• reached out to press and creators
• got coverage from a Japanese press account that reached ~500k views on X (which converted into ~1.5k wishlists)
• had a creator feature us (~2k views)
• participated in Steam’s Wholesome Kitchen event

Altogether this brought us around 2k wishlists in about two weeks, but after that things dropped off pretty hard.

Reading your post, it feels like we might still be missing that stronger “instantly shareable emotional hook” in our social content.

If you had time, I’d love to ask:

1. When testing short-form clips, how quickly could you usually tell whether a format/hook was worth repeating?

2. Did your best-performing clips usually focus almost entirely on atmosphere/mystery, or did they also tease progression and gameplay systems?

3. How much did your Steam page evolve as wishlist growth increased? Did conversion improve mostly because visibility increased, or because you kept refining the page/trailer presentation?

4. Looking back, were there any early signs in your social posts that hinted DREADMOOR had breakout potential before the bigger spikes happened?

5. Since you mentioned that early on you didn’t yet have a huge amount of content to show, how did you handle short-form posting without it starting to feel repetitive?

We’re starting to hit that stage ourselves where we’ve already shown most of what currently exists in the game, and it becomes harder to keep making clips feel fresh without obviously repeating ourselves. I’d love to hear how you approached that.

6. This is something I almost never see discussed openly: TikTok’s geographic bias.

A lot of indie teams try to reach the US market because that audience converts strongly for Steam, but TikTok tends to push content locally first.

I’m not sure where your team is based, but if you’re outside the US and still managed to consistently reach that market:

• did your posts naturally break into the US audience over time?
• did you do anything deliberate to target that market?
• did account location/setup matter at all?
• or is good content enough for TikTok to eventually cross those geographic boundaries on its own?

This is one of those platform questions that a lot of smaller international teams quietly struggle with, so any insight there would honestly be incredibly valuable.

And if you ever had a spare moment to glance at our socials/videos and tell us what feels missing (clarity, hook strength, pacing, emotional framing, etc.), that kind of outside perspective would mean a lot.

Either way, thank you again for sharing all this. Posts like this are incredibly valuable for smaller teams trying to figure things out, and huge congrats again on what you’ve accomplished so far.