Capturing Audience Attention

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I put more of a focus on researching into walking simulation games and the horror themes, our environmental storytelling project falls into those two categories. I’ve been looking into how indie game developers approached marketing their games since we are starting off on a small as well. I’ve touched lightly on the subject from the previous blog post; when I talked about game studios engaging with their audience on social media platforms, the same tactic applies here. 

It was difficult to find a developer talking about how they’d captured their audience’s attention in the same horror genre we are striving for. So, I turned my attention towards finding information on how indie developers promoted their game on a smaller scale. Big named studios would not be a beneficial reference to our project, as we are starting from nothing.

I researched into two indie developers; David Wehle and Concerned Ape, the two of them had similar tactics on getting traction for their games during development. The points they list, I’ll explain here (and ironically these tactics are something I had to do in a group project during my time as a game design student). Wehle’s mentions when creating a game; to give the audience something they already love with a little twist (Wehle, 2020). This could be referencing games with similar visual aesthetics and association to their favourite things. Ideally, you still want to create something entirely different so the game stands out and is not competing with a game that may have very similar visuals or mechanics. 

Now this is an interesting one, both Wehle’s and ConcernedApe, posted images and gifs frequently during their game development, not only to their social media, but to their websites and blogs. Many game studios recommended this marketing tactic, just as Glumberland and Chucklefish did for both individual developers. That’s why it’s a good idea to work on the visuals as soon as possible so you have something eye-catching to post during early development. It is also good marketing data to see what scenes resonated with people and what didn’t (Wehle, 2020). 

A lot of Wehle’s marketing contributed to creating eye-catching visuals, and like I mentioned above; the sense of nostalgia that entices people to come look at our walking simulator. For our environmental storytelling, we a creating it purely based on a horror theme. This may remind people of thrillers, horrors, or supernatural movies/games they may have enjoyed in the past. A cabin in the woods is such a common environmental setup that we should all be familiar with, but how would we take what we know and make this different?

For our project, I watched a video on how to make your writing suspenseful. Rikkonen, the creator of SCP Containment Breach answered how indie developers should approach horror themes, in the exact same way the suspenseful writing video did. As we are limited to lower quality graphics, we developers need a different approach on threatening players during their experience. The common elements in this new wave of indie horror have been making the players extremely vulnerable to the monsters and not giving them any means of defending themselves, and making them feel even more vulnerable by limiting the visibility. (Rikkonen, 2012). I hope to use the same strategy of limiting the player’s vision, since we can’t rely on detailed graphics. 

During Rikkonen’s interview, the staff at Edge asked how he approached popularising Containment Breach, he replied with making threads about it on websites like 4chan and reddit (Personally I wouldn’t use those two websites, but viral content normally stems from there), more importantly he was publishing videos of the game onto Youtube. This is the main platform we should be striving for if we want to successfully commercialise our project, as well as publishing regular updates of our production onto social media, art station, websites, and blogs.


References

Diver, M. (2016). Indie games: the complete introduction to indie gaming. LOM Art, an imprint of Michael O'Mara Books.

Edge Staff, & Rikkonen, J. (2012, August 30). SCP Containment Breach: a new kind of horror | Features | Edge Online. Web.archive.org; Edge Magazine. https://web.archive.org/web/20121116235708/http://www.edge-online.com/features/scp-containment-breach-new-kind-horror/ 

GDC. (2023, May 10). No-Budget DIY Marketing for Indie Games. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWyZlGMysH8 

How to Market Video Games? (2022, September 15). LinkedIn; Ten Pixel Studio. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-market-video-games-ten-pixel-studio/ 

ThatGuyGlen. (2020). How Stardew Valley Was Made by Only One Person. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-k6j9g5Hzk 

Tyroller, J. (2019, April 26). How to Market Your Indie Game! Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwjbLFImXOg 

Wehle, D. (2020, May 13). Here’s Why My Indie Game Went Viral on Steam. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk89lFOkTqI 

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