Welcome to Friday Fun, the blog where I poke my head up from underground, let you all know I’m still alive, and hopefully entertain you with some bits about my project progress and game development experience.
Just a reminder that Preview Demo 1 for Dehoarder 2 is now available for download for Patreon supporters at Beta Cat tier or higher! Sign up as a patron today and be among the first to play this early, pre-release version of the game!
New Trailer and Screenshots
It was high time that the trailer and screenshots got an update. Looking at the old footage, I was realizing how much more populated and rich the game world looks right now compared to those outdated images, and at the same time realized that all of that old media was not doing me any service any more.
So before I went any further with any kind of marketing effort, I created new screenshots, I created a new trailer, and I replaced screenshots and trailers everywhere that I could find that I had control over. I also created a proper press kit for the game.
Dehoarder 2 Keys to Success: Taking Stock
Four months ago in Friday Fun #1, I laid out six keys to the success of Dehoarder 2: Building a Following, Working Within the Time Alotted, Story, Moddability, Production Values, and Pushing My Boundaries.
I have made considerable progress in most of these key areas. By bringing other characters closer in connection to Harry, I have been able to enrich the story significantly. The game is now inherently moddable. Upgrading to Universal Render Pipeline, reworking assets, and augmenting my artistic abilities with AI has allowed me to steadily increase production values, as evidenced by the need for new screenshots and trailer. All along the way, I have been continuing to learn and expand my horizons. I did this all within the timeframe that I set out, which was to get a vertical slice into early playtesters’ hands by the end of October, allowing ample time to adjust strategy if needed. If I limit myself to considering these five of the six keys, things could not be going more awesome.
The only key for which I am disappointed in the progress made is Building a Following. Marketing has always been one of my big weaknesses. Initially I thought I was making progress in this area, as my Tweets about the game garnered more likes and retweets than anything I had done before, and seemed to be drawing in new followers. But that progress stagnated, and the increased engagement also did not seem to be contributing to wishlist rate or Patron adoption rate.
Then, over the last couple of weeks, there was a big implosion at Twitter. No matter what one thinks personally of the situation, taken objectively and in context of my business these events have significantly and measurably reduced engagement in the form of likes/retweets on my posts. While my marketing woes predated Twitter’s woes, the latter helped me realize that relying primarily on Twitter or any social media platform or even a combination of platforms for outreach was never going to be a winning formula.
I hereby nominate “If you build it, they will come” to the list of the world’s biggest lies. It should read, “If you build it, be prepared to invest even more marketing it, so that enough people will come to make it worth the building.”
I know that this game resonates with people when they get their hands on it. I’ve seen it. My biggest question at this point is how do I effectively bring that resonance forward into the promotion of the game? Stay tuned as I try to figure this part out. Bring popcorn. Suggestions welcome.
Innovation Days
One thing that I’ve started to do is to have Innovation Days, where I work on a proof-of-concept or learning new tech. I’m not sure how often I will do these Innovation Days yet, probably less than once a week, but I had my first one last Saturday.
Sometimes I will be comfortable showing/telling about the results of these Innovation Days when they happen. Sometimes a concept may need to simmer and percolate over the course of a couple to few of these Innovation Days before it is coherent enough to present.
I’d love to say that last Saturday’s Innovation Day was the former kind, but it is the latter kind. One cool thing I can mention from it is that I’ve got a pretty cool reusable shader to show for it, that I call my “Jumbotron” or “Scoreboard” shader, pictured right.
For my fellow nerds out there, how it works is there is a secondary camera that renders to a texture that is sized to the target resolution of the scoreboard display. That RenderTexture is then used with the Scoreboard shader in a Material that is UV mapped to a simple quad that serves as the display screen.
The Scoreboard shader itself takes each texel/pixel of the supplied texture, and makes it circular in shape. It could just as easily have normal mapping applied to it to allow each “bulb” of the scoreboard appear to bulge outward, though I have not done that yet.
Conclusion
With everything else that goes into making a game, sometimes as an indie developer it comes as a bit of a surprise when there ends up being so little time to work ON the game because of all of the work that has to be done AROUND the game to actually support it. That was this week, and truthfully probably next week as well. I will try to have other things to share; since I don’t find marketing to be energizing like the actual implementation of the game, it might be a good reason to throw another innovation day into the mix.
Until next time, have fun, and be good to each other.