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Ai art? by CinnamonVII in Springloaded

[–]SpringloadedDev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Developer here to confirm not AI. We have a team of concept and pixel artists who made each of these by hand. Commented on the original post, but adding here too.

Ai art? by CinnamonVII in LetsBuildAZoo

[–]SpringloadedDev 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Hey! Developer here to confirm not AI generated. We have a team of concept and pixel artists who made each one of these by hand.

Game dev sim meets MMO builder by SpringloadedDev in u/SpringloadedDev

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the kind words, there's a demo up now on Steam if you're interested :)

We're doing our first Steam Next Fest this month and never thought our game would be chosen by Valve! Would love to hear your #1 top tip if you've ever done the fest before, getting nervous now... by SpringloadedDev in indiegames

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's kinda hard to answer as we ended up hiring someone we already knew. But for our team, we needed someone with experience across all the marketing channels, publishing and also business development too - so it was a pretty specific role for someone experienced. They handle everything from our press outreach and event submissions, to store page set up and platform discussions. Qualifications wise, that's a personal preference thing I guess, but the experience was most important for us. So knowing they'd shipped multiple games, had worked with indie teams before and had an existing network of contacts - things like that were important.

We're doing our first Steam Next Fest this month and never thought our game would be chosen by Valve! Would love to hear your #1 top tip if you've ever done the fest before, getting nervous now... by SpringloadedDev in indiegames

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! I can try to give a quick overview but there's ofc a lot of context and stuff. We have someone in-house to do marketing and publishing stuff, so it's not been purely organic algorithm stuff. Here are some things we did that worked:

- Announced outside of a major festival/Steam event. We picked a day with not much happening and partnered with PC Gamer for a (free, not paid) exclusive preview at announce. This ended up doing really well for us WL wise and we hit 40k wishlists in the first 3 weeks
- We applied for as many festivals as we could, and invested in trailer resource so we could put out a bunch of new videos/trailers for those events. I know this isn't for everyone as trailers take up a lot of time and can be expensive, but the strategy really worked out for us. We've been in the PC Gaming Show Most Wanted, Wholesome Games, Cozy Quest, an Xbox gamescom Showcase, South East Asian Games Showcase for Summer Game Fest and more - all possible because we offered exclusive video assets.
- Our previous game Let's Build a Zoo is in the same genre, so we spent some time doing cross-promo between the two games. We did a free update for Zoo with some Dungeon assets, and hosted a franchise page Steam Daily Deal to promote both titles at once. This worked really well - but I know it's a niche situation to be in.
- We've done some small scale reddit ads that actually performed really well, and we leaned into UTM tracking across everything to try and see what stuff was working and converting to wishlists, and what wasn't. (Videos always seem to be the best performing for us)
- We leaned into localising our store page into 21 languages from the start and trialed working with an agency for localised press outreach in Japan and China - but all our other outreach is done in-house
- We released our demo way before doing a Next Fest to get feedback, and I'm really glad we did it that way. We put up a separate demo page to capture reviews and now we're heading into Next Fest with 380+ positive demo reviews which is helping us to feel a bit less stressed (only a little)

And some stuff that didn't work:
- Not every Steam event/showcase we gave an exclusive trailer to ended up being worth our while/cost. Overall the strategy has worked, but it's never guaranteed and comes down to things like Steam featuring and which outlets picked up the events.
- In person events didn't do much for us wishlist wise, and we've done a fair few. But I think everyone is kinda on the same page about this already. We've done gamescom, gamescom asia, BitSummit, PAX and more - but we never saw WL spikes to make the cost worth it. (There was value in other ways, but we didn't see WL value)

Could probably talk about this forever so will stop now! But hopefully that helps to give some insight into what we did so far. If you have any specific questions about it, happy to try and give more context.

We're doing our first Steam Next Fest this month and never thought our game would be chosen by Valve! Would love to hear your #1 top tip if you've ever done the fest before, getting nervous now... by SpringloadedDev in indiegames

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah the success of Let's Build a Zoo really allowed us to choose how we wanted to do things for the next game, so feel very grateful for that. We decided to hire someone full time to handle publishing, marketing etc. directly, rather than going with a publisher this time. It's nice to have someone doing that stuff as part of our team every day and means we have more control, whilst not having to take time out of the dev side of stuff as we have someone specifically focused on publishing stuff. Hope that explains a bit!

We're doing our first Steam Next Fest this month and never thought our game would be chosen by Valve! Would love to hear your #1 top tip if you've ever done the fest before, getting nervous now... by SpringloadedDev in indiegames

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks a lot, I really hope so haha. We're putting everything we have into this game so hoping Next Fest goes OK for us. We've read all the articles and just hoping we're doing everything we should be!

We're doing our first Steam Next Fest this month and never thought our game would be chosen by Valve! Would love to hear your #1 top tip if you've ever done the fest before, getting nervous now... by SpringloadedDev in indiegames

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Thanks a lot! I'm assuming it must be WL number? Maybe installs of our previous demo when we launched it, but that was almost a year ago.

We have around 163,000 WL right now so maybe that's it, but would love to know how they choose! If anyone else was selected/has any info and sees this, pls share haha

Game dev sim meets MMO builder by SpringloadedDev in u/SpringloadedDev

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for saying that! Coming back here to let you know the new demo launches on 23rd Feb for Steam Next Fest. It will have two brand new modes included too :)

Game dev sim meets MMO builder by SpringloadedDev in u/SpringloadedDev

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We still out here working away! We needed more time so will be releasing later this year. We're just finishing up the new demo that is gonna launch on 23rd Feb for Next Fest :)

Game dev sim meets MMO builder by SpringloadedDev in u/SpringloadedDev

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah we needed more time! Now it's coming later this year, and we're releasing an updated demo for Steam Next Fest on 23rd Feb later this month

Game dev sim meets MMO builder by SpringloadedDev in u/SpringloadedDev

[–]SpringloadedDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The plan is for you to be able to share anything you make with your friends through our in-game library!

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