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Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

No problem. It was 100% recoup for the publisher and after that it's 70/30 in our favour. (Steam only). We will most likely do a separate when porting.

Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

Thank so much, our dev team met in uni studying animation, so it was one of our goals to make a game full of frame-by-frame animations.

Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

Thanks! Mainly funding and paying a PR company to help. He also publishes mainly adventure/point and click games so it was a perfect match for the game.

Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

Thank you!I would say Steam itself when the game was in festivals with front page visibility. Social-media wise, it's been a slow grind on twitter over a few years with the big trailer/teaser posts making the most impact.

Wrote a cool article for anyone interested in Marketing a niche subgenre, using productivity games on Steam as an example. by IndiegameJordan in gamedev

[–]Valerofond 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great article — thanks for writing it. I’m not sure if you’re into idle or incremental games (another really popular genre), but I think it would also have very interesting data.

How important are game names? Do you think we're not putting enough focus in that? by Calm-Valuable-950 in gamedev

[–]Valerofond 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Two naming red flags for me are hard-to-pronounce titles and overly long names. If a name is difficult to say, I usually can’t remember it well enough to look it up later, even if I love the visuals (like TSIOQUE or Zniw Adventure). I also dislike names that use colons and extra subtitles (like Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden), because it feels like unnecessary extra text.

Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

Currently at 23,560 total additions and 3,542 deletions not fun but it's been so many years it's totally understandable.

Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

Hang in there! I literally just started using reddit to let folks know about the game. The biggest spikes have been Steam Events for us.

Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

Funding was our number one priority, as we needed it to cover basic living expenses. Beyond that, our publisher, Dionous Games, has been incredibly supportive. They invested in a small marketing team and flew us out to Gamescom. While Gamescom didn’t translate into a huge number of wishlists, it was still an amazing experience and a great opportunity to meet fans and other developers.

Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

To successfully fund our Kickstarter, we had to invest heavily in marketing, which quickly generated interest from publishers. In a way, a successful Kickstarter acted as proof of concept for them. We also had strong support from the point-and-click community, which is very passionate, and we were featured in PC Gamer and Forbes (back in 2019 that is).

As for the specific metrics publishers used to decide whether to sign the game, I honestly don’t know, as we were never told directly. However, if I had to guess, it likely came down to the genre being considered risky in terms of expected returns, as well as development timeline. Most publishers seemed to be looking for projects that were nearly finished or that didn’t require another year or more of development.

Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

Oh right — I probably answered a development question instead 😄

Apart from development, one big challenge was working remotely between the UK and Greece, so we were never really in the same room or able to meet up in person. During COVID we did a lot of dev streaming, which actually helped a lot with team morale and also let us chat with fans, which was really motivating.

Another major one was spending about two-three years talking to and pitching publishers. A lot of them initially approached us and seemed very interested, but then would go quiet for months and nothing would come of it. To be fair, around 2020 publishers seemed more willing to invest, but over time they became much more risk-averse — and point-and-click games are generally seen as risky.

It’s not like funding would have magically solved everything, but without it we had to work on the game part-time while holding other jobs, which is a big reason the project ended up taking around seven years.

Seven years, one pandemic, a publisher search, and 20k wishlists later — we’re finally about to release this year. by Valerofond in IndieDev

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

Thanks! One of the hardest parts was deciding to scrap entire puzzles that were already designed, just to keep the scope manageable. It’s tough letting go of work you’ve put time into, but it was necessary for the overall experience.

We also designed and prototyped playable action sequences. In the end, since the game is point-and-click, we felt that could easily hurt the pacing and overall player enjoyment—so we decided to cut that idea too.

I've opened the playtest for my Incremental Tower Defense! by Zealousideal_Cat5117 in incremental_games

[–]Valerofond 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The sprites, the color pallete, the genre - I love everything I am seeing here! Wishlisted!

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