Despite developing games full-time for three and a half years already, I am still discovering the best approach that I want to take while developing games. I run my studio together with my partner Helen, who makes the art for our games.

In October 2018, I’ve told her, Helen, to just draw whatever she wants and put it on twitter. Ten months later, we have published our game, Merchant of the Skies, into early access. It is a direct result of that decision. I’m going to tell you how this helped us make the most successful of our games so far.

How It Started

October, 2018. I’m finalizing our previous game, Rebel Story, port to consoles which mostly requires code changes and not much art assets. Helen does not want to idle so we decided why not, let her just draw things she likes and just put it to her twitter / portfolio in case it helps her to land some contract work later.

So she drew Octobit and Pixel Dailies images. The results have been varying.

Some pictures were well received. It made me think: what if we can use them as a style/concept for a new game?

Not all images are drawn equal though. If we try to put them in the game – we need to make sure that we can effectively create the assets of the same style. The temple on the left has distinguishable art style that is reproducible. The tweet with the ruins to the right got way more likes, but it is super-detailed, so it means that we’ll need way more time to draw similarly-styled sprites.

Side-note: for every game we decide to work on, there are 6 prototypes on average that did not work.

Market(ing) Research

As soon as we agreed that “we can do something with that temple”, the mockup /  concept / mini gif production process started. There was no game at that point.

Example of a gif that we made. Took roughly 4 hours for me to program in Unity.

In the end, we made three tweets to see if the style resonates well.

All three tweets were well-received (based on our own standards). That made me think that “self-marketable” style could be a great asset. I suck at marketing so if the images make people want to reshare them, then we are on to something.

Gameplay

This is how Merchant of the Skies really started. I’ve had an idea of the sky-faring strategy game before, but I could never come up with a proper gameplay. This aesthetic style had its own constraints and actually enhanced my creative process. Essentially, this style gives following limitations:

In the end, we decided to have a world map and different island hubs (each <6 different buildings/tiles) that player can visit. Each of those hubs either offers a base / company that player builds or some world event / quest.

Sounds easy in hindsight, but it took me quite some time to figure out how I want it to play. To me, gameplay should always win over style/aesthetics. If the game is not fun to me, then I scrap it.

Building the audience

So we’ve decided on the gameplay, but the game is not yet announced. We are in the process of making playable prototype with minimal asset amount to make a store page. Some people advise _not_ to post anything on twitter until you announce the game. We are a smaller team without large reach, so I’ve decided against this approach and essentially started putting most of the things that we were coming up with. Helen’s twitter audience grew from ~500 people in October to 1200+ people in February. Coldwild Games twitter account also started to see gradual organic increase in audience. It’s not a huge amount (we were under 2k) at that time, but some people who followed the progress closely started to appear.

Announcing the game

On Mar 7, we were ready. Steam page has been published, we’ve made two separate tweets at different times, sent press-releases (mostly ignored) and made reddit / imgur posts that got minor traction.

Helen’s tweet got more attention than mine so I’m still jealous about it, but it became clear that twitter should be our main source of announcements at that point. Everywhere else there was not much traction.

Gifs work much better than images.

Wishlists

Now, another curious thing is the Wishlist graph. We got a bit more wishlists that we wanted before the launch (slightly over 5k). It did not look like it would work out until our second trailer announcement and things also got better after summer sale and right before launch. Anyway, the chart and spikes:

To make it short:

Basically no secret formula here. Hard work at making content pays off. But it does take a lot of time. Roughly 30% of development time went into preparing social media posts / addressing the audience / spreading the news.

Mentorship

Extra shout-out goes to Weather Factory studio for taking me under their wing 🙂

To make it short: you already need to know what you are doing and have a vision of your own. I had the work of my studio planned beforehand, but I needed (and still need) sanity checks when it comes to the details. I.e. handling the marketing / press / pricing / working on game design. Lottie, Alexis and Claire has been able to selflessly help me out with that.

Apart from that, all of them provided informational support (such as retweets / mentions), even though they did not have to. It has been a substantial help over our own marketing efforts.

In any case, I can highly recommend finding yourself a mentor (after you are sure you want to go pro and actually finished a few smaller games to at least understand what you need from the mentor).

In case you want to learn more about Weather Factory mentorship, you can read about this on their website.

Release Prep

Two weeks before the release, things get hectic, so I always have a checkbox of things that I want to do. This release was no different. The timeline for me this time:

Two weeks before launch: