Sunday Devlog 7: Tales O’ Battles & Plans!
Arrgh! Welcome back to yonder! I have many a tales, tales o’ battles and tales o’plans arrrggghh!! Let’s talk about it in ye olde dev log seven (seas).
Ye battle O’ attention!
Don’t worry, this whole devlog won’t be in pirate speak, but I will keep the titles this way lol.
Let’s go back to the past for a moment. After the game was finished, I posted a video clip of the game fresh off the press to reddit’s r/rhythmgames .The post was super successful and was a big reason I decided to turn this into a steam project!
Stats from the r/rhythmgames post
However, I also curiously posted about it to other games related communities, mostly gave dev subreddits. They were far, far less interested.
Stats from other communities
This made me realize something: your game’s target audience care a LOT more about it than random game devs online. This led me to coin a term I later realized already existed: sniper shot marketing.
Something I came to discover was that “sniper shot” marketing was much more effective than just posting into the algorithmic void. “Sniper shot” marketing as I like to call it, is marketing directly to your target audience and only your target audience. There are numerous benefits to this, most notably being that it’s much more cost & time effective and lets you understand your audience better. This linkedin post I found is a bit old but does a good job of explaining it.
Why am I saying this?
It’s now been over a week since the demo has launched on Steam, which has prompted me to try to do some marketing for the game. This meant making some social media posts and trying to get the word out there. And of course that good old “sniper shot marketing”. I posted again on r/rhythmgames, the same place where hundreds of people upvoted it before.
Pow!
Something I came to realize this week: Social media is unstable. There is a big reason people on most social media sites absolutely spam content like crazy: it’s because the algorithms behind these sites are completely AI controlled and can be very spontaneous and random with how they suggest things to people. Every time you post, you roll the dice, and the more times you can roll the dice, the higher a chance that you roll successfully.
Of course these AIs aren’t completely random - they show people what they think they will like, and they know posts worded certain ways, or with certain hashtags, or even colors and patterns can help or harm appeal. But it’s a complete black box, even to the employees of these companies. This leaves us, the creators, to figure out how the dammed thing works. So in the meantime, I’ll keep posting into the void as I work on the game and hope for a lucky roll!
I could also write an equally long piece about trying to figure out if something was wrong with the game and asking people on game dev communities, but that would hugely balloon the size of this devlog, which isn’t even close to being done yet. In short, I got some helpful, and some not-so-helpful advice on how to improve the steam page trailer, so a new trailer for the Steam page will be complete by next log 
.
Ye battle O’ social media!
I’ve begun to understand why even the smallest of companies hire social media managers. The thing with social media is that to effectively market on it, you have to be on it. But these sites use deep learning AI to make their platforms more addictive than even the most potent crack.
Because I need to check for comments on posts to reply to them, I turned my time limiter for social media off. But this led me to accidentally scrolling for a couple dozen minutes without realizing. Then I turn the limiter back on, but I still need to check social media. Despite the leaps and bounds my time limiter has done to make me more productive, needing to check social media a lot has hampered it a lot.
I’m still not exactly sure what to do about it, but it has slowed me down a bit this week.
Ye battle O’ time management!
This week I started an online class for college credit! This would have nothing to do with the game, but because of doing some online work plus dealing with social media, it’s further cornered some of the time I can spend on the project. Fortunately I know how the class works a lot better now that I’m a week in, but it’s also been contributing to slowing me down.
Ye plans 'fer albums!
Let’s talk about the upcoming albums a bit more!
It’s stated on the steam page, but the full version is planned to have 7 additional albums. These will vary in size and song length, but in general you can expect each one to be about as long as the first album.
All of these albums stacked up is kind of intimidating.
Earlier this week, I updated the navigation UI to include the three albums being worked on right now and the four “empty slots” to be filled by artists on the internet soon™. I actually already did find an artist who I got permission to use some music from!
Speaking of the new albums, I finished the artwork for the three new albums. Here it is in-game!
All of this art is subject to change, but with a modular system to add backgrounds and styles to the game, there is a lot less in the way of making new playable albums! I’m looking forward to sharing actual gameplay footage of these albums in the coming days and weeks!
Ye plans 'fer release!
As long as things go smoothly enough, the full version will LAUNCH on August 19! This is the same time the Steam Rhythm Fest starts, so the game will be at a substantial discount, probably 25%.
In more short term goals, by next week I’m hoping to have a new trailer on Steam that addresses all of the issues of the current trailer. This should make the Steam page more appealing and hopefully draw more attention
Arrrgghhh!!
Thank ye fer readin’ the dev log once again!! This week was rough on the sev’n seas but there be many a thing to look forward to! We are off to continue sailin’!!
-Encabulated Games