The end of the year is approaching which means it’s time for annual re-cap and review posts! First up is conference talks. We attended 3 of them this year, which probably resulted in listening to around 50 talks. It was a lot of information to take in.

This blog post is going to be biased towards ThinkyCon as it was the most recent conference and likely the one that had the largest influence on Fatemender design decisions so far. The rest are going to be the few talks that were able to stick with me across multiple months.

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post so I thought I’d do a quick little summary one to re-cap some of the bigger things we’ve been up to as a studio. Summer is often a busy time so we’ll likely shift our gears as we get into fall and fight the urge to hibernate for the next few months.

Grants​

We did 2 big grant applications over the summer. The first was for WINGS Elevate, a grant focused on women led development teams. The second was for Draknek New Voices Puzzle Grant which focused on traditionally underrepresented groups. These due dates were exactly a month apart which worked out nicely for us to be able to use our demo for both applications.

A few weeks ago I posted about the values we want to live and work by for our studio. That first post focused a lot on Awareness: knowing who we are in the world and the effects of our actions and choices.

We've already made some more strides in our goal of using less big American tech by switching from GitHub to Forgejo!

But today I wanted to talk about our core value: sustainability.

This blog post is a bit of a sequel to A beginners journey through indie marketing. In that post I talked about what I'd learned about how to market indie games as well as the small amount of marketing we did for our first two games.

Today I'll share the exciting results of our first Steam Festival; Debut Fest.

We've been making steady progress on Fateweaver these last few weeks. Hit a big milestone of implementing every single rule we had in paper into the digital version; Parity Milestone!

With the rules and functionality in place we're now moving on to more graphics, sound design, and bug hunting. We have only 2 weeks until one of our grant application deadlines so it's all hands (4) on deck for this last push.

But before getting into Fateweaver updates I wanted to share a game design exercise that helped us identify a problem with our core set up; Tier List your X.

We've been hard at work on the Fateweaver prototype as a funding opportunity looms ahead of us in August.

Sophie's been implementing the ruleset we came up with months ago while adding animation and design in Godot. I've been creating the main art assets that we'll need to make the game playable but also have some of it's final style. I'm happy I spent so much time trying out different styles because it gave me time to really get better at the one we went with, woodcuts.

With a few social plans cancelled for the weekend, I was able to get my last remaining cards done this weekend and declare version one of the Fate Cards ready to go.

While a lot of my time has been on studio stuff and Fateweaver assets these last few months, I’m still squeezing in some additional learnings. Not all of them art related. So this is a grab bag of random things kind of blog post.

Companies have values. Studios are companies and thus studios have values.

They at least say they have values, they state them. But it’s pretty hard to tell if they actually live them or believe in them.

As part of the Baby Ghost program we’ve been thinking about company values a lot. Because I like to process my thoughts by writing, I’m going to do some brain dumping about how we’ve approached the exercises, what values we’ve landed on, and how to make our values explicit through our actions.

Finding our values as a studio - first draft​

I like to start all my homework with a bit of research. So when given the assignment of brainstorming our values I first searched for lists of other company values.

All the places I’ve worked have had values, very few of those places took them seriously. So starting this assignment feels a bit like “choose the values you’ll eventually fail to live up to”. But that’s not approaching the assignment in good faith or with optimism. There’s nothing wrong with planning for success.

A piece of advice we got was to “go wild” with our values, even if they seem weird or difficult or extreme.

From marketing our existing games to more early concept work for our new game.

Since our existing games were done for game jams they didn’t really have much of a development cycle, you kind of jump straight into production for game jams. I remember very clearly sitting down on January 1st and getting started on character sprites for Spellphage with very little preparation. I had made Pinterest boards for a few of them, maybe did a few messy sketchy Lauren attempts, but that was it.

For Fate Weaver we’re giving ourselves way more than a month. We still want to keep development tight but we are still aiming to have a playable demo out before the end of the year. This feels like a luxurious amount of time at the moment but I know it’s going to feel like nothing soon.

This does mean that I still need to be smart about the art style we go with. For an MVP of a demo we’ll still need 20 Fate Cards, 5 Land cards, 10 items, and hopefully 2 characters. It’s still a decently large amount of assets so I want to choose a style that’s not too difficult to pull off consistently.

So I’ve been experimenting.

From game design to game marketing. A near fully entwined pair. With the amount of games published year over year, marketing has become less optional than ever.

So I’ve been learning how to market.

I can’t say I love it, nor can I say it feels like a science. Modern marketing feels like Tweeting to zero followers and hoping someone stumbles by.

But I’ve been spending time in marketing places and trying to learn from those who don’t see it as a nebulous black box.

How to Market a Game​

If you search for anything concerning marketing a video game you’re going to quickly come across Chris Zukowski. Over the last few years he’s become the expert on marketing video games and Steam trends. If you see people doing videos on YouTube about what genres of games to make and which ones to avoid, they are likely pulling from the work that Chris has done.

He has a website where he blogs regularly, he runs a Masterclass to get you marketing faster, he runs an active Discord, and he really seems to constantly be doing talks all over the place.

The thing I really like about Chris’s content is that he gives the vibe that he really wants people to succeed with their game. He shares so much data, making it publicly available, saving individual marketers and researchers so much time.