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.

From game design classes to paper prototyping our new game. We’re moving fast over here.

Paper prototyping is the idea of making a physical version of your game so that you can play it as quickly as possible. This doesn’t mean making nice art assets or finding the perfect meeple. It’s very much the idea of a minimal viable product that gets you playing faster.

This doesn’t work for all video games of course. There isn’t much benefit for trying to paper prototype a platformer or a huge open world game. Unless you can boil down a part of those games into a form that can be simplified enough to play by hand.

By having quick access to a playable version of your game idea you can start testing out your design. Do the rules make sense? Is it too easy? Can a player complete the game? Does it need more cards or less cards? If you can paper prototype it, you can test it, toss it, iterate on it, in less time than it would take to program your original idea. It’s this time save that makes paper prototyping so useful. Instead of spending a month developing a minimal digital version you can have something going in an hour. You can even have other people playing it before even opening a game engine. As a young studio with minimal runway, this felt like the obvious path forward for our new game.

So we cut some sheets of papers into smaller rectangles, created a few cards, and started playing.