'Chicory' Marketing and PR Postmortem

Just to start, I'm going to be doing a Chicory postmortem. We're going to be talking about sort of my approach to the marketing and public relations um campaign that we ran throughout sort of Chicory's development and then through its launch. Um and to start, I'm going to tell you um one, this is Chicory. If you're not familiar with it, I can totally recommend it. Um one, we published it, but two, it's awesome. Um and other people thought it was awesome, too. Um I if you have any questions about how we managed that save file system, um I'll tell you about it over drinks. Uh it was quite a task. Um when you can paint everything in an entire game, uh there's problems sometimes. So, first off, my name is Rebecca Saltsman. Um I am the CEO and co-founder of Finji. We are both an independent

development studio and a uh sort of micro indie publisher. Um This is my information. I don't close my DMs on Twitter, so feel free to reach out. Um and that's our website. And uh if you need to email me, it's [email protected]. If you want to send me a pitch, it's [email protected]. Um I run the studio with my husband and partner. His name is Adam Saltsman. Um he sort of runs the creative side of our studio. So, our internal development team. Um We are based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is probably a weird place for a game studio. Um we kind of love it. Um Some of our past games aside from Chicory, um we uh we launch a lot of games, it feels like. Um some of them include Canabalt, which is sort of the old endless runner. Um my husband is the designer on that. Um we also launched Overland, which is an Apple Arcade launch title back in 2019. And then we've published games like Chicory: A Colorful Tale, um Night in the Woods. Uh last week we launched Tunic, which

I'm a little tired. It's yeah, it's pretty cool. It's been like 8 days and it's been awesome. Um and we also have published uh Wilmot's Warehouse and several other like mobile titles, sort of legacy mobile titles. Um our studio itself is actually pretty small. I'm giving you this information so you have context for the type of marketing and PR talk that we're talking about today. I am not a big studio. These are um sort of skills that we use when we work on a very small team. Um so, the size of my studio does matter. There are about 16 of us sort of across internal development and publishing. Um and they're uh on sort of biz dev, marketing, community management, and launch operation staff, there are about four of us and I'm one of those four. Um we have three QA staff and a little over eight or nine development staff. Um we also work with a PR and marketing firm in Europe. And this is actually brand new as of 2021 because our it just got too busy. There weren't quite enough hands to handle our campaigns anymore.

Um and they have been helping us roll out our PR and marketing campaigns and they embed directly within our studio. Um and they're they've been helping with all of our launches. So, Chicory, Tunic, and our upcoming launches. Um I run the biz side of Finji. Um I'm also a core creative team member on the community and marketing initiatives that we produce. Um and I'm also a member of the creative team on our internal development projects, mostly in the narrative and narrative design realm. So, that's just a little bit about me and where I come from. I approach marketing and PR um as a marketing and PR professional. I worked in media relations before games. In a different life, I was not always in uh running Finji. I had a career before games. Um and that career was in media relations. So, I'm now going to tell you a little bit about our campaign. Um I On March 19th, 2020, that date probably looks kind of familiar cuz on March 13th, my kids didn't go back to school

anymore. Um everything about the way that we launched games changed. All of my plans got erased. We came home from PAX East in 2020 and we're like, "Okay, we're not going anywhere anymore." Um we had this Excel document that we'd been using for years for our marketing meetings and we had to add a tab that was just, "Oh god, what can we do now? How what how are we going to launch this game? Chicory's coming up on content complete. How are we going to tell anybody about this?" I'm a bit of a doomsday person. Um I was I was pre-med in a former life as well. So, when I was looking at the epidemiology and reading the reports, I was just like, "Oh no, we're not going anywhere." Um so, I started panicking and started trying to come up with like 300 different backup plans. Um in our meeting, we put together this tab and we just started like brainstorming. If we're having to launch this game from home, we can't go talk to people anymore. How do we do that? And how do we do that with our staff of three? Um

and our new marketing firm in Europe who has never launched game with us before. Um So, I'm going to step back a little bit so you sort of understand where we started. We picked up Chicory um after the Kickstarter campaign. So, Greg and his team actually launched this in August of 2019. Um we so, we mentored Greg a little bit with Wandersong. Um so, after the Kickstarter campaign, we approached him and we're like, "Hey, do you want to work with us? This would be really fun to do together. We've always wanted to do a game together." Um so, we announced our partnership in February of 2020, which was right before PAX East. Um which was the next month. Um After that, everything locked down. We couldn't see each other anymore. Um and we had to move over into more of an online sort of PR and marketing beat calendar

um indefinitely. We did the June 2020 Summer Demo Fest. Um we did uh Indie Arena online, which we're going to talk a little bit about later. Um we also did um in that time, I negotiated our PS5 um partnership. Uh and we announced that in February of 2021. I I'm going to tell you about when um Chicory was feature complete. Put a big old X on that. We were feature complete with the game in August, the very end of August of 2020. We didn't launch until June 2021. This is an indie title. We're usually like we launch and we're like hitting the Steam go button like 30 seconds later. We were feature complete like I mean, gosh, 10 months in advance. You're wondering, "What the hell did you do for those 10 months?" And what we did was a massive PR campaign. Um I because we had sort of all of this extra game development time, um we

started doing more things online. Um we found a localization budget to make the game a more worldwide launch. Um and a lot of this was due to the fact that we were sort of trapped. We couldn't go out and talk to people. And we had to figure out how to get a bigger audience from home. Um we also had to port the game as it was built in GameMaker um to uh PS4 and PS5. Um and since we were launch title, there we had to build in a bunch of a bunch more engineering time um throughout the process. So, back to the timeline real quick. Uh announced our PS5 announcement in February 2021. Um we announced a timeline exactly a month later and we knew that these were going to be separated. Um we knew that these were going to be a month apart even when I did that February announce. We put the game in LudoNarraCon. Um and there's reasons for that, which we'll explain. I didn't announce a launch date until May 27th, which was 2

weeks before launch. People look at that and they're like, "You're crazy. What were you doing?" All of this was very intentional. Um there was kind of no there were a lot of other options, but there were no better options for this particular title and the state of the world at this time. So, we launched the title on June 10th, 2020, which historically, everyone knows that's E3 week. That's also kind of a I terrifying. Looking back now, I'm like, "Why would I do that?" Launching during E3 is terrifying, especially when you're like a black and white game um where you color everything and it's very cartoony. Um But, we worked really hard to have some partnerships to make that um to make that work. So, from March when we announced until May, we were actually in and out of the certification process. Um if you've worked on new hardware before,

that is kind of a dicey time. Um especially being the as far as we know, the very first GameMaker game uh to come out on a PS5. Um Our schedule had to be kind of loose. We had to be able to absorb any engineering unknowns um when we started our porting process. Um So, the reason why we felt confident for being able to pull off sort of the 2 weeks' notice of a game um kind of before their launch date is because of all of the timeline like sort of leading up to this point. Now, we're going to step even farther back. Who is the team? Why did it matter? And this is a piece of the marketing plan from the very beginning. Before Finji, the Wandersong team um included Greg Lobanov, who's the lead designer on the project.

We had several past launches between all of the team members. They included Wandersong, Celeste, Guild Wars 2, Night in the Woods, Untitled Goose Game, and Ikenfell. Those are Those are just from the team that worked on Chicory. So, if you're looking at like, why does it have a 92 Metacritic? Those are the games these designers worked on. And this little this super team of mostly Canadians came together and built this during a pandemic. We also had three experienced devs that were leading the new devs on that team. Uh, Lena, Greg, and Emma Halberstadt are responsible for some of the best indie titles that have come out in the last several years and were able to sort of teach and mentor both Alexis and Mad- Madeline through the process. The game also had clear design goals. They knew what they were making, they knew what they were relying on, um, and

um, they didn't spend a lot of time sort of arguing about the end goals of the sort of the design of the game. They knew exactly what they were um, sort of racing towards. Which is like a really good position to be in, but you have to acknowledge that. When you look at a team, you have to look at a team holistically. If you don't have a past like that, you're going to have to make up for it. So, that like when you put together your pros and cons in front of you of how to market a game, if you don't have it, it's a con. Nobody knows who you are. How do we bridge that gap? In our case, we had that, so we could build off of it. Which is why their Kickstarter already had a leg up. Um, Greg loves Kick- uh, Kickstarter. He loves audience building. Um, he loves interacting on the internet. Um, he's one of the few devs who will like schedule out tweets for months just to make sure that he has engagement and he doesn't and he doesn't forget. Chicory was Kickstarted. It had Sorry, I

have to read this number. 2,342 backers. Um, their budget was actually pretty small. It was I think it was 50 or 60,000 to, um, uh, complete the campaign and they ended up with like 87,000. Um, what they were able to do with this and, um, there are a lot of other ways to do this, but this is one of the many ways to do it and Night in the Woods did this exact same thing. Is you are building sort of your very first audience. Um, in this case, the, um, the team already had their first audience because they had past fans. With their Kickstarter, they were able to create their second audience. Um, and these are players who are excited, who are seeing this thing for the first time and now they're going to have access to, um, all of these newsletters if you're going to do a Kickstarter properly. Uh, with especially indie marketing, you're

always looking as for a way to create levels of audience. Who are Who are your initial fans? How are you building a second set of initial fans? Who is your third set of initial fans? And you can do this in a in multitude of ways. If this were normal times, it would be like third set audience would be who you're developing or who you're meeting at PAX. And those people at PAX who you're like striking up relationships with, they're going out and bringing other people over to your PAX booth to create your your in-person real life audience and they're going to go out and continue to talk to more people. In this case, the Kickstarter, I mean, thank goodness because we didn't know about pandemic at this point, this was their second level audience. Sorry, dry mouth. Um, so, with Kickstarter, you have this opportunity to have this early audience gathering, this the early audience communication. And the thing that you're

developing at this point is a term that I find really interesting. It's one that we rely on, um, internally to Finji. And we call this a maven. This is like sort of an old, um, sort of media PR cultural term. Um, and if you sort of follow pop culture or something, um, these are the people who are They're kind of trendsetters, but they're even in front of trendsetters. Um, they are uh, it's a sort of media term for early adopters of things. Um, they are going to be the people who don't just adopt it, but they're going to evangelize it as well. Kickstarter backers are people who will evangelize a project for a very long time. Um, it's been a useful word to think of, um, for our games just across the board. Um, it's I it's a word that I've been using for almost 20 years. Um, because they generally will end up being

long-term fans of your company. Um, early adopters of Greg's work or even like pre-Wandersong fans who came from his early early work when he was sort of late teens, early 20s, came into Wandersong, came into Chicory, and are probably going to follow him into his next project. And they will continue to talk about this. They will see a Kickstarter and they will send it to other people. They're also the people who will see the 26 updates on a Kickstarter and send them to other people. Uh, Chicory did 26 updates over 18 months of their Kickstarter campaign. Constant communication with their their first and second tier audience. Um, mavens have a tendency to also not be ashamed of their fandom. Um, uh, so I'm This is embarrassing and I'm going to say this and this will probably end up on like a YouTube channel someday, but I am a Spice Girls maven. And it's okay. I can say this out loud.

I love the Spice Girls. I I've no shame at all about this. I This The sort of people that you're trying to get to adopt, your early adopters, your early mavens for your game projects, you want them to not be ashamed of like just being so enthusiastic about your work. I And you can do this just by You can support them obviously with their updates. You can support them by talking to them on Twitter. I You can provide content for them to share, the kind of content that they're interested in. People are always going to seek connection to the things that they love. And when you provide that connection, they will share it with others. Now, after Finji, um, so we came into this game with like a a reasonable size Kickstarter audience. We had past projects. We had fans of these creators. And I had to figure out like, what the heck are we going to do with this? And my job is I have to design a launch plan.

Um, for a game like Chicory, that's actually kind of hard. Um, I'd never worked on a Game Maker game before. I had never launched a PS5 title before. Um, and I'd never worked with Greg and his team with the exception of Emma before. Um, I had to sort of take all of their strengths and consolidate them into something that would be useful to talk about as Finji, the publishing project. One of those things that you have to do is you have to, in order to design the launch plan, is you have to identi- identify the points of intersection between what the team wants, what Finji needs, and what our business partner, in this case Sony, needs. None of those things align in exact like perfect, um, in in exact perfect alignment. We have to look for the places where we intersect, where our interests are identical. Um, and that might be we need to sell a bunch of copies. We need to be, uh, well reviewed. We need to be,

um, something that people can say, "Oh, I was involved with that pro- project. It makes whatever look good." Or we supported a diverse team. Like, there's a lot of different places that you can have intersection with the various stakeholders on a project. All of these should be part of your marketing campaign. They should be like the base foundation. As you're figuring out how to maximize the intersection points where the three parties involved have common goals, you're able to pencil in possible marketing beats. So, this seems difficult, but if you're sort of if you're looking out in front of you, like I am launching a game. Sony is my partner. What is an obvious possible mar- possible, um, intersection point? We need to launch something. They know the public doesn't know the title. So, we need to launch the title. How do we do that? Well, we are working for a common goal to an event. They need a trailer on device so

they can show it and then they get to be the ones that bring that news to the world. That's an intersection point. Sony has a need. They need to announce this game. I have a need. I need to build an audience. So, we're all both working towards the same thing but using the exact same asset to get there. That's what you mean by working towards a marketing beat, working towards the same goal. Uh, there's a lot of ways to sort of pencil in your marketing beats, um, between current and future available assets, interviews, events. What's out in front of you? And usually question is like, well, I don't know. We'll get to that. I don't know what's out in front of me. When you're sort of looking at this and you're looking at like 18 months until launch, there's probably like five to 20 versions of this. Well, what if I do this? Well, then I would go to this event and then I would talk about it this way. And at this event I could talk about X design. I

could set up an interview for Y. I could have I could participate in this event in this way, which would cause me to talk about story or like you have you think about the reason for the event or the talk or anything and how can you turn that into something that produces content that people can get a hold of in the news or on the internet. I I I built five of these in the summer of 2020 um following multiple distribution paths to launch. When we decided to go with Sony, when we sort of developed that partnership, I sort of went quiet with Chicory in the fall of of 2020. This was super intention intentional at this point. Um we have a tendency when we know how we're going to launch a game or we're like we leak out a little bit of information and then things go very

very quiet for a long time. Um it's because I'm holding new information for what we call springboard times. Um so for example, this is unrelated to Chicory but it's most recent example. Um I I had a launch date for Tunic and I knew that launch date for Tunic back in the summer of 2021. But nobody knew that until December because I was holding that for springboard time. My springboard time was the game awards. This was similar with Chicory. I knew that I was content complete. I knew that I had this PS5 deal but I had to wait for a springboard time in order to announce it, which meant that I knew when exactly I would be launching the title. We also tie springboard times to new assets, things that people can latch on to, things that people can share. We also tailor the message for each channel. Um the way you talk to um some press is very different from how you talk to other press, which is very different from how you talk to your Kickstarter backers, which is very

different from how you talk to the kids on your Discord. All of them have to be tailored to how they're going to be receptive to the information that you're sharing. And you always work towards the next news drop. So cool, I did some like we announced that we're coming out oops, I'm sorry. We we announced that we're coming out on uh PlayStation in February of 2021 for Chicory. I knew in March that I was going to be announcing the range that it was coming out. It wasn't the date because I didn't know it yet. But we're like spring, which gave me a max deadline. It had to come out before whatever June 20 something is when it turns into summer. Um we did that all intentional but we were working towards that next news drop when we did the February launch. And the way that you can always be working towards your next news drop is you prep 90% done assets for quick turnaround. When you're a super super

small studio and it's your partner is like, "Hey, I need an on device trailer." And you're like, "Cool, that's 4 weeks of work." Who the hell can do that on the kind of turnaround time that a lot of consoles or business partners ask for? Nobody can. I can't do it. And we don't. Um I had that Chicory I had the February Chicory launch uh trailer. I had that asset done in April of 2020. We only had to make edits to it. We had to put it in the correct timeline. We had to add the right bumpers. Um we were working on the the Tunic trailer that was storyboarded and worked on last fall. Because we were working towards events that we were hoping to get a hold of well before we actually had it confirmed. Especially with something like trailers, try to work towards 90% assets. Finishing up 10% in a week is possible. Doing a trailer in a week will hurt you

and it's not a good idea and it's not going to be a good trailer. Um and it's unkind to all of your collaborators. You also have to be flexible. Um we were up for an announcement in October of 2020, December of 2020, I possibly even January. I think we had one canceled. And all of those announcements for getting on like getting our PlayStation announcement announced just fell through. There wasn't room for it. It wasn't a good fit. And we just continued to hold these assets because eventually we would have the correct intersection point that would make the most noise. And if your partner is on board with it, if your partner is also helping with this marketing, that will work. So be flexible. Now, one of the main things that we have a tendency to do is we position our team to take advantage of an external op we call these ex ex this is the nice way to

call these things. When somebody calls you up and you're like, "Hey, I want you to be in an event." We're like, "Oh, that's a great external opportunity." Um rather than cursing. We used to just curse. Um position your team to take advantage of an external opportunity before it happens. I people always ask, "Well, how? How do you know this?" The industry runs on a calendar and it's not a mystery. The calendar is the same every year. When does Apple do their fall announcements? Second week of September. It's it just is. When do they announce stuff? March 25th. Like there's a there's announcement in March. You can just find this information by just looking at the internet. You can just make notes. The platforms also run on a calendar. The events run on a calendar. And your game marketing schedule cannot ignore that calendar unless you are so big that you make your own calendar.

You are probably not that big. I there's very few people who are that big. Uh 4 years now, many years, I track every single event. I have like a Hobonichi like uh paper calendar, which everyone makes fun of me for. They're like, "Why are you not digital?" Like, "Well, I like writing things down." Uh I track everything in that thing um 4 years and I keep them stacked actually behind my desk. Um I track when the sales happen across all platforms. Um I track events. I track um studio vacations, when when uh Sony goes on vacation at the holidays. I track that. Um I track when they announced major games. Um that way I can go back and I can look for correlations between how the calendar moves from year to year. When are state of plays going to happen? I can tell you that. When are Xbox Twitch events going to happen? I could probably tell you that,

too. Because they have internal like process that dictates the timeline that these things can happen. And you don't have to know what any of that is. You just have to look at when they have the events. Now, I we ended up in a position obviously with COVID that we were trapped. We couldn't go to PAX anymore and now we're forced to figure out how to make use of an online event with a tiny tiny team. Um online events are going to are going to then and will now increase launch reach because the industry has changed like always like time stamp this talk today on March 23rd or 24th, whatever it is. It it is different from the industry of 6 months ago and it's going to be different from the industry 6 months from now. The online events are not going to go away. Online demo events are just not going to go away because we have created

a system now that was hard to create where people can access these things. Steam demo events are awesome. Um they happen all the time and that was not a thing that really existed in the form that it is now before the pandemic. They tried maybe one of them and it was heavily curated. And now you can just turn your demos on and off with a button, which is like not how it used to work. I if you can't turn people's heads in real life, the next best next next best thing is at home access. And this really does open it up for those of us who can't travel. Um it is not realistic to say, "Hey, everybody go to PAX." You you you can't do that. How do you why do you like I can't go to the Tokyo Game Show. I've never been there. I really want to go. I'm never going to make it there. I who can make it to Gamescom this third week of August? It's expensive. When you have these online demo events,

it means that you also can be sitting at the same table as all the other game developers in the world on a a platform like Steam or if any of the Xbox for example also did a demo demo events last year. I and it's up to you to sort of figure out how to make the most of these online events cuz it's not just the event. So I I have pointed out just on here some of the events that we did and this is uh correlated to our Chicory wish list. So we have our Kickstarter campaign when the um page went live. We have the first Steam demo fest. I think that's actually the very very first one that they did. Um I've highlighted three others. Indie Arena online, which was the Gamescom uh 2020 um sort of fill-in. Um LudoNarraCon is awesome. Uh if you can participate in that, it takes over the whole front page of Steam and drives wishlists for the whole

weekend. All of this matters. These are all marketing beats. These are all ways to collect your audience before you launch your game. I put a a picture of this up here. This is my online booth for um IndieArenaOnline in 2020. Uh it was and is an online like MMO where you like walk through virtual booths. Uh all of these things like if you hit on if you hit play, that would take you to the Steam page to play the demo. Um it had like soundless trailers running on it. You could click over to my merch booth, which was just like my Fingy store. Um and you could We had little NPCs in there. You can sort of see Chickory dog in the middle. Um which had sort of a Twine-like um conversation uh dialogue system that my community manager Harris typed up. And it was all Twitter-linked. It was really hard to do

cuz it was so limited. And every single one of those people I think was named me. Um but we just put in conversations. What is the game about? How can you um what's the quickest way that you can tell people what Chickory is about? Um this thing was not easy to build in 2020. Um it's gotten much much easier. They actually changed and overhauled the whole system for 2022. No, 2021. Um it's so cool. And it's a way to participate in Gamescom without actually going to Cologne. Um you are engaging with a European audience that you might otherwise not have access to. Um in addition to like just building a showpiece booth, um which took about 2 weeks. Um it was way harder in 2020. We provided an entire weekend of online streaming schedule. We reached out to streamers to play our demo. And we let them stream it on our Steam

page. We provided uh we made our own talks and recorded them with like lower thirds and the whole thing and we streamed them on our Twitch channel. We did Q&As with developers in our Discord. So, we had Greg and his team come in and talk to fans in our Discord about the game design. And then they could just go play the demo. We did we did our restreaming. We did Twitter initiatives. So, um during this time we did uh Chickory character haircuts. Um so, we would um We were in the process of adding all the hair mechanics to the game and we were just giving all the the characters haircuts. Um we also did a draw draw whatever in the Chickory art style just on a live art stream. Uh it was awesome. Like these timed demos

were such a cool opportunity to provide content directly to our fans. So, online event participation, you did it, but you're not actually done. You can prep your content in advance. You can use the tools that just the internet gives you at your disposal effectively. It's going to drive online engagement because that's literally how the system is designed to work. You can use all of these pieces and it's just for a weekend. So, we refer to we have a minimum viable project product when it comes to online events where we have like a certain number of things that we try to schedule for each day cuz you don't have to keep it running the whole time. Um so, for Gamescom we tried to do like maybe 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Um so, like during our work day. And that's all the content that we'll provide because we're catering to a European audience. If we're working in the Steam demo fest, we're working more at night time. So, we're trying to catch like the after-school crowd.

We're looking at one to two things a day maybe. If you're if you have a Discord, you can just turn on like the radio part and you can like sort of host a audio show. Um we do those all the time in our Fingy Discord. Um it's just fun where you can just like have people come on stage, have them ask a question, talk about game design. Um it really does though all of this. It um it will take time away from you, especially if you're a small indie team. So, you need to actually build this into your production schedule. Um The cool thing though because all of this stuff is online, for IndieArena especially, um and we did this with the Chickory team. We actually started building content in July for this event. So, that way we didn't have to like do this stuff live. Um who wants to do that on a Saturday? We would run the shows that we had pre-recorded. Um and then we had like these 5 weeks we

could put it into our schedule and then run the content. And especially if you're a small indie team or any team, the next time there's a Steam demo fest, you want to know what content you can run? The content from your last event. Cuz you want to know how many eyeballs saw it at that time? Uh 15? Let's go for more. Like you can just rerun your content. Rerun old streams. You can just put them up on your page. Um this work is not just like a one-off thing. You can continue to use it. Um all of our platform and single-day press beats um even for other platforms increase awareness. Um these are also our wishlists. Our Sony announcements have spikes on our Steam wishlists. Our launch date announcements spike on wishlists. Our launch day wishlists. Um every single ev- every single time that we talk to the public, we had spikes. Um if you ask any developer in this

industry to show this graph, I promise you every single one of them is going to have the same information on it. Every time you talk to the public, you absolutely will have wishlist increases. And even when you announce for other platforms, you will have Steam wishlist increases. This has been this way forever. And it is really important to like internalize this truth about how Steam works. Um because all of this works for us as developers towards one goal. When we launch a game, people know that the damn thing is available and they know it's available because they've wishlisted the game. Cuz we don't have huge marketing budgets. Now, this was a weird one for us. Um participating in the Summer Games Fest. Um it was we were like sort of coming up on launch and we had all of these assets sitting out ready for basically us to

go. Um and we needed to be ready at any point to participate. We had our launch trailer. We had an accolades trailer like just ready to put accolades in it. Um we had we had ideas of how this could work and it was sort of our job to pitch them. Um I mentioned already that we were sort of at the front of the PS5 launches. Um and we knew that we weren't going to get months of known ramp-up uh on our launch date because new tech things often have unknowns. This doesn't make launching a game impossible um unless you prepare yourself. So, when it is time to go, you are ready to go. So, um I'm going to talk a little bit just like how did this come together? So, um we launched actually we shadowed almost shadow dropped. Um I negotiated a pretty cool version of it. We didn't tell anyone what time of the day it was going to be launched and we had it as part of the Steam or the Summer Games Fest um which is Geoff Keighley's event.

Um so, we mentioned that it was going to be launching in spring in March of 2021. Our porting efforts were absolutely taking longer than expected because of um sort of our game's engine and the new hardware and we had planned for this. Um and we knew that it was going to be like real tight um coming into our launch. And it was very hard being patient. So, when it looked like we were going to hit the June date, which happens to overlap E3, which is kind of a terrible time to try to launch a game as an indie, um we started negotiating hard for an E3 spot um using both our contacts at Sony, but also my previous contacts with um sort of Geoff Keighley and the Game Awards. Um there were a bunch of options on the table and one of those absolutely was a complete shadow drop, which would have as I talked about earlier, we had these Kickstarter backers who are earliest fans. And of all the people that you

want to make angry, uh you don't piss off your mavens. So, if we had shadow dropped a game, we would not have told people who are most excited about our game that it was launching. They wouldn't know that they could play it right away. Um they would have had to clear their schedule to get a hold of it. And that's kind of a cruddy way to treat your best fans. Uh so, we sort of negotiated the best version of this, which was we will tell our fans that we're launching, but we're not going to tell them exactly when or how. Which means that they also get to participate on launch day in the sort of like really loud version that we had arranged at the Steam at the the Summer Games Fest. So, we provided a way forward that hit all of our goals across all three people or all three stakeholders. We had our launch day announcement, which meant the Kickstarter backers were going to be satisfied. We had our exclusive partner content, which meant that Sony was going to be satisfied. And we had a press push with a known embargo and streamer push, which

meant that Finji could talk to press and get our reviews in order. And we had beautiful assets from the team. It was not hard to do this, but looking at what the end goals were for everyone involved meant that we were able to come up with a solution that allowed everyone to have sort of a a part in the process. If anyone ever wants to talk about that, we should do it over drinks. It's pretty stressful. Uh so, traditional PR plans are wonderful. PR, public relations, is like talking to media and press and sort of navigating that that whole uh industry, and it's very weird. The the thing that's super super important, especially even with small indie titles, is to understand that press uh game reviews are awesome, but that's not PR. That's just what happens when you launch a game.

Public relations and media relations is being able to pitch a story about you to the media to get them to cover you beyond your press review, your game review. This is going up and talking to them and being like, "Hey, I have a really cool dev story. Let me tell you about it. Would you like to talk to my team about the process of inventing gender genderless language for a 75,000 word script? How do you do that in French? It's a nightmare. That's a story. That's a pitch. That's something somebody would want to talk about. And it's not a game review. Or the intersection of creativity and feeling like you're not good enough in the games industry. Also a story. Let's talk about impostor syndrome. And let's talk to the Chicory team about that. They did a whole game about impostor syndrome. Or lessons learned from Wandersong. Why does Chicory shine in a different

way? Like that's pitching stories that people want to talk about that are not game reviews. That's traditional media relations. And we started that in June. No, not June. We started that way before June, February. And we had the stories start trickling out in May and June. We also did physical press kits. This is the first time we ever did this and um it I almost vetoed it and I'm so glad I didn't. Um we spent money on 150 physical press kits and it wasn't your normal like sort of garbage swag. We um we did watercolor scenes of the the game itself. We sent custom watercolor like um I don't even know what the cartridges plus paint brushes. Um we did a donation to um uh schools. Like so, every one of the press kits cost like $15 and I did $15

like per press kit and we donated this directly to um educators in the United States who are teaching art in schools, um which you can pick up from DonorsChoose. Uh it just is a charity donation. And we told people we did that. We didn't tell the internet we did that. But we told the people we sent the press kit to that we did that. We also did like a custom pin of the the lost kittens. Um this was all themed directly around um Chicory itself, things that mattered to Chicory. We wanted the press and content creators and um even the team got them to sit down and watercolor a scene like in real life and not just in the game. We also did key distribution to press and tiers. Um we tier our press. Um top tier, NDA tier. They get three to four weeks to review a game. We also do one week before, day before, and day of, depending on if

we're afraid somebody's going to break embargo. We also did huge asset overhaul. We checked screenshots, GIFs, trailer cuts, and we made sure that we worked ahead so all of these things were ready to go in the weeks leading up to launch. We also used developer tools for launch. On Steam, you can just put streams up. Did you talk to anybody about streaming on your web page on launch day? We also had a very small, very modest advertising budget, um which ICO helped us put together, um pointing people at both Steam and the PlayStation store pages. Um and we did uh uh test runs of that to figure out who would be the best audiences um to sort of point at a Finji game. Uh and that was actually a really weird process. Um uh because we don't uh What's the word? We didn't discriminate against

audiences. Uh Finji has an amazing supportive furry audience out there. We just do. It's cool. And providing advertisements to that audience was like a no-brainer for us. We have a a game that's all the characters are animals. Like and they have a great like representative um audience on Twitter. That should be part of our audience. And we did a test on that to see if that was an appropriate way to use our ad money. So, we always work ahead on all launches because nothing is stopping us um except ourselves. We love to procrastinate and we are very aware of that. So, we work way way way ahead. That way we are always ready for when something does come up. You can write your press release for your launch two much two months in advance. You know the most about your game. You can just put it in a Google Doc and hang on to it. And you can also research your press contacts two months in advance. You can like not

procrastinate that so you're ready to go when your game's ready to go. You can pull your Steam keys early. You can make a trailer that fits into your schedule and hold it for a year. I'm holding two trailers right now. Three trailers. I am holding three trailers right now. Um and I've had them done for quite a while. One of them I've had done since 2020. Uh and it's just sitting in a Dropbox waiting for the right moment for me to show the world how cool it is. You can build a burn down list of things to do for launch and assign them to the right people. And that right person might be you. It might be just your burn down list. Um we keep actually a master list in Notion. I have several of these now. Um and they'll be like 60 or 70 items long by the time we're done. Um and we divide it out between the four of us. Uh So, yeah. I have time for questions. I just want to sort of end with um when you limit yourself to the ways other people talk about their games,

um when you limit to the way that you've seen other people do things, you're actually doing yourself a disservice um as far as like how you talk about your own games. Um you're no longer representing like your living product. Um you're sort of following arbitrary rules without considering the outcome. Um each game's marketing plan is unique within the game itself. Um and that's like a super important design tenant. Uh you need to be able to sort of create a possibility space for how you talk about and engage with your marketing problem um as a creative design problem and not just like, "Well, these are the rules. This is what I'm supposed to do." As game designers and developers, we do have the opportunity to approach marketing from the realm of design. And our medium specifically is uniquely positioned to offer up ways to connect with our audience when you are looking at the problem in a

more holistic way. We have access to a lot of tools. And your game itself has mechanics and themes within to build a whole interactive process out of those tools. Chicory had that. It was built into the way it was painted. It was built into the GIFs. It was built into the way that Sony also wanted to show it. And all of the pieces that we did were designed to maximize the systems in place. The Steam wish lists, the audience building, the collection of more people inside our Discord. We brought talks into our Discord, they stayed as fans. All of these things were built together. Um we did not think about them as individual process um that we just sort of did once and threw away. Everything is a stair step. Everything builds off of each other. Um So, yeah. If you have any questions, I've got I think maybe 11 minutes. Um I

usually am able to do a bunch of wrap up, but I have to catch a flight home um in about an hour. So, I'm not on the plane in an hour. I have to be at the airport uh or in my car in an hour. Um So, yeah. If you have any questions, feel free to ping me. There's a mic there and I will repeat your question. And it can be kind of about anything. Hey. Uh quick question. Do you have any examples of your you're talking about Mavens a lot um of acquiring that audience when that Kickstarter isn't involved? Um Uh there's actually there's a bunch of ways. So, it kind of depends on what you're actually going to do with your project. I will we'll do the most obvious one right now. So, say you have a demo of your game. You got it up on Steam and you're going to participate in a Steam Demo Day. When that happens, like your Steam forms are kind of already open. People are going to be talking about it online.

It's possible you're going to find somebody talking about your game on Reddit. Those are the sort of people you want to watch literally everything people say. They're not going to be like you're never Well, actually you might. If you end up at like an event or something, you might actually meet them and learn their names. But, you're going to watch everything that they say because they're going to talk about it. They're not going to be able to stop. It's going to be endless. They're going to pop up all the time. We have one actually in Tunic who is a fan of past work of one of the collaborators on it. And it was really funny cuz they dropped into our Discord and like every people familiar with them were like, "Oh, no, they're here. This one This one right here is a super fan." Which is awesome because they were I mean, once you see a super fan drop on, you can sort of see people gravitate around them because they have a tendency to know more about your project it feels like than you do. And they talk about it

better than you do cuz they just understand it on like a usually a very personal level. You'll run into them as well like if we ever get to go back to real events like PAX or whatever, they'll come and explain your game back to you. And just I mentioned this before probably at a GDC talk, wholesale steal their words because whatever they came up with is better than what you are going to come up with. That's happened more than once. Of course. Hey, thanks for the talk. I had two things. The first was how do you approach post-launch content stuff like speed running like GDQ Chickory was at GDQ and I assume that was something you were aware of and involved with. And then the second one is when you have these projects that you know you are working on stuff very long in advance, how do you decide what is the project that I'm going to work on today? Like how do you know, okay, we need to be prepping assets for Tunic versus Chickory versus whatever else is still in the pipeline.

Those are good questions. So, the first one First one is about GDQ. So, Chickory was debuted at the speed running Is it Awesome Awesome and yeah, Awesome Games Done Quick in January. And the second question is like, how do you pick and how do you fit in like production? So, first GDQ is really interesting cuz we actually didn't know how it worked. We've never really had a game in it exactly. You can't just like say, "Hey, GDQ, do Chickory." That's not how it like the community the speed running community are the ones who like submit like I want to do this and like then they get chosen or not. So, we actually didn't have much to do with that other than like we crossed our fingers and prayed that somebody would We knew there was an active speed running community. But, we didn't really have any ins or a way to ask them to do that. And honestly, it's a faux pas you don't.

So, we just really really really hoped that they would cuz we knew all the people who speed run it cuz Greg is super like absolutely love speed running. When it got selected, so talking about working ahead, we had this dream of doing this custom PS5 which are obviously very very hard to get a hold of. My community manager, because he's on the computer all day and needs to keep his airline card active during COVID, has been sourcing PS5s for friends and family. I That's how I got mine. But, he sourced me the second PS5 in February of 2020. I had been I had that PS5 sitting in my house for a very long time and we started talking to Zandra and was like, "Hey, you want to just You want to paint these plates? We'll ship them to you." We didn't know what we were going to do with that PS5. I I just had it done and had no place to put it. And when GDQ

like Chickory got into it, I asked Kevin from PowerUpAudio for an intro. I was like, "I got a prize for you. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. I have this PS5 PS5 that we painted and this is a cool charity focused way to offload this beautiful thing." So, it was it was one of those it was one of those moments where I was I have a painted PS5. How am I going to offload this? And I had I didn't know how and I was just waiting for an opportunity to do something with it. And that sounds crazy probably, but it was such a good idea an opportunity will come up. So, that's how we got rid of it. We didn't have anything to do with Chickory getting in, but once I saw the opportunity, I did something with it. And I got to donate a cool PS5 to charity. I don't know who got it. I really would love to see a picture with this person who's has this like

beautiful like black light painted PS5 someday. Second question, production schedule. How do I figure out like am I going to make a Glory Society trailer today or am I going to do a Chickory asset? Are we going to like focus on a GIF or a talk or when you look at the calendar out in front of you, you have a pretty good idea of where things are going to slot in. And you also know what you're working on production wise. You often are able to slot these sort of things into breaks. People just can't program and solve things endlessly forever. Building these marketing assets are like using creative time in a different way and we usually try to slot them in in a way to give people breaks. So, a lot of the trailer work was done in breaks between things before a portion of the game was started or after it was finished up. So, that way like part of the part of the

materials were like halfway done. And then when they sat down do it, they were able to knock it out in a week. We work that way in like Finji internal like 100% of the time. Like right now we're stewing on a pretty big project. We're not going to build that until like the last week of April because we want it storyboarded. We want all the pieces of it already ready to go before we like sit down so we don't like just bang up against like a wall trying to figure out or a way to make it work. So, we usually have a pretty good idea of like these are the things we're going to need in the future. About how much time are they going to take? And as soon as we see that time, we slot them in. So, we don't stress people out. Does that make sense? Okay, cool. Hey there and thanks for the talk. So, let's talk a bit about money. If you were to kind of count all the resources involved in marketing, be it I don't know hours of work straight up money spent on it, compare

that to the money that or resources that you spent making the game, what's kind of the ratio between the two? For marketing, it's actually quite low. Like I'm a pretty tiny company. So, I'd probably probably in total across all of the Chickory stuff and I have to discount I'm not going to include salaries for my staff. No, including salaries for staff working on marketing stuff. gets a little weird cuz they're working on like five projects right now. So, I'm going to give you two. Okay. So, in total like all of the things that I spent on Chickory over probably two years, we're probably looking at maybe 18 to 20,000 dollars tops. Okay. That's like online booths, maybe a computer, the PS5 is pricey, paying Zandra to paint it,

shipping that thing around. We did have a small advertising campaign which was I think like maybe 7,500 across both our tests and the like one week that we did. And that went really far. It was surprising. And kind of how like what percentage of the time does the staff work on marketing stuff? So, my staff goes full-time on projects when we need to be full-time on it. So, during Chickory's like time, we did they were probably doing at least probably 10 to 15 hours of Chickory work right up until six months pre-launch and then it was probably closer to 20 to 25 hours of work. And that's across like trailer my the staff also does launch management. So, cutting up the assets into like 500

different ways for storefronts. The 10 to 15 different versions of the trailer that you need with the different branding on it. Um And so, this is a staff of it's me, Harris, Emily. And then ICO handled the PR and they probably did five to seven hours of work a week. Um So, yeah, whatever that budget is. I I can't the number won't help because it's going to be in USD, really. Yeah, no. I I I was more or less trying to get a sense of kind of the scale of work. Yeah, the scale of work. So, if if if this was only my job, I could have done all of the work solo. Okay. Um like it is technically one person's job. many months? Uh it's like 6 months of work. Okay. So, 6 months of work for one person is kind of well far the way our studio structured like Harris also runs our business. No, of course, but yeah, that's the

scale. Okay, cool. Thanks. Yep. The thing with PR though is it's not 6 months of full-time work. It's 18 months of part-time work. And then one really awful week. Thanks for the talk. Yeah, cool. I know we're at time. I saw you. Okay. Uh what what's the approach to creating the demo for a narrative game in your sense? Uh do you take like a vertical slice as to like the middle of the game and just present it or do you like create the first part of the game and present the story up until one point and then cut it off on the demo? Uh it's actually a really good question cuz I've had to do this several times. So, the question is how when you're building a narrative game, you're obviously you're in a position where you're going to spoil a whole bunch of stuff. How do you pick which part of the game you're going to show in a demo? So, I've I could do a whole talk about demo design cuz I'm it's important, especially if you're going to be showing this on a show floor.

Um I have rules about length. Uh 10 to 15 minutes, especially if it's on a convention show floor. And you want to drop them into a place where knowing exactly who and what the characters are is not required to have a good time with the story. Um so, we did uh two or three different demos with Night in the Woods. Um the first one was a very bespoke. Um it most of that first demo didn't even end up in the main game. Um it was just intro May, get her to a place where um you sort of interacted with her friends, do band practice, throw a gnome off the top of a uh rooftop, eat some donuts, done. That's a real thing. I can't believe I say these words out loud in order but that's a video game. The second one however cut um one of the friend quests. Um so, you are hanging out with B and you're in the mall. And

it's again the same thing. It's showing you're walking, you're doing the mini-game, you're getting an understanding of like sort of the humor, but not there's nothing about it that's going to spoil the contents of the game. Um we never ever in a demo show the very end of the game and in a narrative game we never show the very beginning cuz the very beginning is a like onboarding. Who are these people? That's it's not boring, it's great, but it's real boring for a demo. Cuz what you want to get them to is the game loop. And for a narrative game, there's probably going to be something there for the game loop and it's probably going to be cut from like a scene in chapter two. Um so, find your 10 to 20-minute long scene in in that chapter. Um and then cut out the spoilers. So, it doesn't actually have to be shippable content. It can be Oops, it can be like a a very custom version of it. We can even I guess build something that's not going to be shown ever on the game just to for the demo's purposes. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the Night in the

Woods initial demo was I mean, it's I think it's technically like actually built into the the final game, but nothing nothing actually is in the like pulled in. Um it was all replaced. Um but it's still I I can still find actually in the script like in the tags and stuff. Thank you. Of course. Any other questions, comments? Okay, cool. Um feel free to reach out to me. I'm easily uh I'm easily found and very approachable. So, thank you.