Game Discoverability Day: NOTICE ME: The Grind Behind the $272K Funding Success of Boyfriend Dungeon

[Music] hello everyone um I'm Victoria and thank you for coming to my talk where I'll be basically talking about all the work that we've done behind the scenes to make a boyfriend dungeon success so a little bit about me I'm the community developer at Kitfox Games talk more about that later previously I've worked on a bunch of other games I've been a community consultant slash social media person for a bunch of games like omen site leap of fate and more I have been trying every bubble tea place in San Francisco it's almost disgusting but that's okay and I'm also half of a thing called peach buck comics which is a game development comic about like the culture of video games and making it from the game developers side and that's on Twitter if you're interested and of course you can also find me on Twitter at the V Tran I'm there shenanigans everywhere yes so kit box so kit Fox is a small independent Montreal

indie studio where a team of eight and we've made quite a few games we've been around for six years our most popular I guess developed game that's out so far is moon hunters we call that our personality test RPG that was also a Kickstarter which I'll be also talking about later you've maybe heard of boyfriend dungeon which I will delve into and we've also kind of like dipped our toes into publishing and we'll be publishing six ages which is the spiritual successor to king of Dragon Pass and the legendary Dwarf Fortress onto steam which is very exciting you'll see also on the photo there that so there's five people there which includes me we are the development team behind boyfriend dungeon so it's only a team of five so there's some things that happened there and the rest of the kit foxes are great but they're not part of boyfriend dungeon sorry they're also wonderful I just wanted to point out those that kind of little group because this kick started was not just me it was the work of many people

including consultants and a lot of help and I just wanted to make sure that you know that it's their work - okay so boyfriend dungeon if you don't know boyfriend dungeon is a dating simulator dungeon crawler mash up where your weapons turning to beautiful people and you take them out on dates and that makes them stronger in the dungeon it has male/female non-binary romance it was wonderful and you're probably here because you heard about our Kickstarter our Kickstarter went pretty well in just over six hours we reached our $65,000 goal that was wild and I was not prepared and in the end we ended up being funded for like two hundred seventy two thousand dollars again wild and amazing and I kind of just want to talk about all the success that we like all the success we found and how we did it so the first step is actually just to have a good game like have a good idea post it and then you will profit thank you for coming you can all leave now

[Applause] obviously this is not what happened this was not an instant success but the thing is from the outside it definitely looked like did right so this was our announcement tweet obviously impressions doesn't necessarily mean everything but this just to give you a sense of how big it became we almost got a million impressions when we first announced it it got viral got 50,000 engagement 50,000 total engagements and then when we announced the Kickstarter and this is again just a Twitter because this is mainly our focus in terms of community it also went viral again and it just basically looked like it blew up we had a huge like following etc we also got news coverage from some of the biggest gaming news sites and then some like some general entertainment ones like GQ and basically felt like it blew up and it was everywhere some people asked me if we paid for reviews and got like ad space and stuff and I can assure you we didn't because I

get a grand total of zero dollars for my marketing budget and you know it's just like something's invisible until it's only visible and there's nothing in between and it's really hard to kind of unpack that so what I'll be talking about is all this stuff we've done to try and set it up for success and this is all the invisible behind-the-scenes work that the team put into boyfriend dungeon that people don't usually hear about we didn't know if it would work to be clear you can know all the stats and all the best practices but there's no guarantee if someone guarantees you that it's gonna go viral don't trust them I mean or trust them I'm not gonna run your life so kid fox has released three games and has announced three more and what I want to talk about is what we found to be consistently useful in getting some form of attention across all our games of varying genres and themes so this is the agenda with a focus on getting noticed first and foremost hence the title and basically making sure people hear about your game maybe you'll find it useful and maybe the stats I show you will help you gauge your own levels of

success and what that means alright so the first thing that I find the most important is basically the hook it doesn't matter how good your game is if literally no one finds out about it which is unfortunate there's already been a lot of great introductory resources on like various marketing aspects like growing social media creating a press list etc I can't talk about that well we're moving on from that one thing that continues to be the most successful parts of boyfriend dungeon are its hooks hooks are basically things that grabs a person as attention into learning more about your game there can be multiple different ones there's like the description there's the art etc we'll be talking about that but the best ones are the ones that create an emotional like level of connection to them so ideally how long do you have to take how long do you have to captures a person's attention to seconds that's however long it takes to scroll past you on Twitter see you on the upcoming games on Steam etc and what you have to interest them in these two

seconds is tell them like you want to learn more ideally give them some idea of what the game is about and stand out from the hundreds of other games that are being released every single day so I'm going to quickly break down Boyfriend dungeons hook by giving you a glimpse at how we built the steam page I'm using steam instead of Kickstarter because I figure moat more of you will have that then a Kickstarter page but you know who knows so the first one is the title of course this is really difficult and you want a title that has good SEO so when you google it it doesn't auto correct to something else and it doesn't sort like you don't find another more popular thing like if you named your I don't know your game Google don't do that that's a bad that's bad SEO we also have the trailer which of course isn't playing but you know this is one of the biggest pulls in terms of hooks visually games that's what a lot of games are about and of course games do well without visual like without great visuals but it is a really easy way to grab someone's attention and kind of form that emotional connection we had a

tagline called romance your swords and this is really good because you usually want a one sentence description that anyone can say anyone who isn't in games and is in games can understand and kind of draw us that emotional reaction shock and slash is a really bad pun and I'm very proud of it and it's also a pun that like puns are actually great hooks because you know again you have that like kind of guttural feeling of either like this is the best thing in the world or this is the worst thing in the world genre can be a really good hook for us it was dating sim dungeon crawler could be different for anyone and of course the steam capsules themselves are really important for when people are scrolling through again this is just a really brief overview so one of the hardest hooks I think to nail is the description of your game I want to talk about here because I find that's the one people most struggle with so my question to you is what game is this it's a fast-paced 2d action-adventure with challenging combat a rich story and gorgeous art it's actually boyfriend dungeon it might

also be hollow Knight it could possibly be dead cells it might be the messenger but my point is it's really easy to put a game in there so my favorite thing to do when I'm creating a game hook description is to remove your game name and all other like nouns from the description replace it with a game that's a competitor or maybe similar to yours and figure out if it's basically indistinguishable if it is then you need a better hook if you need some help making something unique take out everything you would usually use to describe your game and try to this rabbit again without these words for example don't use the word story-driven don't use puzzle don't use narrative don't use mystery action Metroidvania please don't use fast-paced I've seen the word fast-paced in so many games and it's it means nothing to me now it does it still sound interesting enough to play right so all of these descriptions that I've put on the screen these are all like these are from the

games themselves and I just basically just removed like words from them and it still sounds really interesting right you would still understand the game any normal person on the street could probably repeat it and kind of understand what it's about essentially your hook needs to elicit some sort of strong emotional reaction this can be good or bad and it's not necessarily informative about the game this is why cinematic trailers can still work and even if they tell you nothing about the game as long as you embed a feeling in the player when they read about it even before they start playing and oftentimes what the team finds most technically interesting doesn't translate well to what the general public is interested in though that can depend on your demographic so every game is different and different hooks have different values so for instance precision procedurally generated might be good in one respect or maybe if you're trying to describe it to a more general audience you can just say it's different every time in a similar vein know what not to say about your game this prevents disappointment or narrow assumptions of

your game for example we did it we don't define boyfriend dungeon as a visual novel because that kind of feels like it erases the fact that there's any dungeon crawling at all we use the word dating sim because it feels more like interactive a little bit more game play that kind of thing it's also important to know your key differentiators this is Veera market research done ages before you even start prototyping your game you have to see if your hook has already been used or if it a similar hook has been already used and if so why it did or did not work and remember not all hooks apply to all games equally definitely a narrative game values things differently than a shooter you just have to really find yours and do the market research so note that with hook strategies this doesn't describe a small aspect of your game it should actually be core to your gameplay right like we do actually have dating simulators and dungeon crawler mashed up together and that's the entire game again though hooks come in different forms such as cinematics or arts and we

had previously announced boyfriend dungeon you know in this in its existence way before we did the kick start I think we announced it existed in October 2017 and the Kickstarter was in August 2018 so we knew for the campaign we wouldn't need something really fresh and exciting to show things off and you know get that explosive reaction that we wanted from the crowd so we put a lot of work into creating this transformation sequence that we got from particle-beam it paid ten times over for sure and in addition and in addition to all the original music it's an example of knowing what your audience wants and trying to you know get that emotional level from them and it elevates the games look polished and helps people literally understand what the game is about when we say your weapon's transform into people but this takes so long it takes forever and that's okay the best descriptions are ones that everyday people can repeat themselves and it's memorable take the time for it and make sure it works you know and you

can practice it the best places are at conventions when you're pitching your game the longer it takes for you to pitch your game probably the shorter you need to make it okay so now that you've solidified your general impressions on the community at large it still matters what that you think of kind of different hooks when you're contacting press whether they're content creators or journalists why so I asked one of my game journalist friends to send me a screenshot of their inbox they write for very large games outlet and they don't write full time for this so keep in mind this is like a part-time journalist this is from their review codes folder which specifically picks out emails with certain keywords so there could be more in their general inbox if you check the dates they get at least two press emails per day and here's even more of their inbox with even more press emails and here's another I got tired of blowing out information so it just blurred out the entire thing here but the point is there's a lot of emails and when you email press you better have something newsworthy to tell them we stick to we

strategically made sure never to show or tell certain aspects about our game until it was time to announce it to the press again there's a lot of resources on how to write a good email but I want to stress a good title may be more important than what's actually inside the body of the email so in this case the outside counts more than the inside and I'm sorry but that's how it is because after all if they don't even click your email it doesn't matter what's inside personalizing and figuring out what press people like will be beneficial here the first email title is one that I sent to a general press member that I'm not really close to the second one is one that I talked to on Twitter and I realized they really like butts it worked they replied and you know for it and this changes depending on whatever news outlet you're talking to or the people you're talking to for example this is dwarf fortresses when this is I think I sent this last week almost and this was an email I sent to people who might have not necessarily known who what door fortress was and you

need to know like you know kind of what's really interesting about your game in order to properly email at the press and you know kickstart is by themselves aren't newsworthy when we emailed press about our game we barely even mentioned the Kickstarter the whole marketing beat was the fact that we had a new trailer with the cat at the forefront and why the cat because the glimpse of the cat during conventions when we showed off the trailer actually got the biggest emotional response like people just asked was that a cat so when we decided to email press we basically just put the cat in there and yeah I kept track of every single comment that we got in our trailer and this is why you really want to pay attention to what people are talking about so if you nailed their announcement and press contacts that's not what the entire marketing thing is about right you have to keep people interested so that by the time your game actually releases or the mid campaign slump comes around you have something for it being a team of five on boyfriend dungeon means we often had limited resources or found we couldn't do everything that would be considered best practices and my full-time job is

to do the best practices I had no time so that's where the community helps so we're not big forum people so usually I can't I'm really bad at posting on reddit and reset era and all those things I'm sorry if I'm a failure of a community manager there but it's okay because that's where the community steps in community and social media are helpful catalyst and increasing your chances of being noticed a strong community approach means they'll reach more places you'll never be able to even think of and give them opportunity and also if you give them opportunities to help you you can be honest and they will want to help but let's be clear about one thing though social media is not just about memes social is helpful as a compass to direct your community and signal what's so cool about your game and without them having to read entire articles about it because let's be real here not everyone does that and it's also great for word-of-mouth which is way better than any marketing you can ever do so when you find those people that are willing to help make sure that you've reward them and you pay attention because they will be your fans for life and it's

great okay so let's talk about some kickstarter optimizations we did to try and get more people to kind of notice us so even when the kick started self launched we had certain techniques to help increase the hype or make it more exciting to people who wanted to back the game so one of the things that we found really good it was actually the limited time early bird instead of like a limited number early bird we made it under a 24 hour limit psychology wise people tend to want to back a Kickstarter that looks like it's close to being funded or already funded which sucks in its own way but that's how it works so you want to basically just try to have the most hype near the beginning and get as much funding as possible because that will really incentivize people to back you we also had hidden stretch goals this made it an exciting piece of news to look forward to and it meant every time we announced a new stretch goal it was its own newsworthy piece for a goal fun goals actually turned out to be pretty good too not necessarily because it motivated people to fund us but it would actually spawned just nice inside jokes and kind

of like a community sense for those that followed the Kickstarter and of course I'm going to talk about a little bit of stuff that didn't work out because I think that's really important one we reviewed we revealed stretch goal costs too early when we announced our stretch goals they were secret but we announced the cost upfront and we should have kept that hidden in order to account for any changes that would come up later and they did and another thing that in relation to the money thing is that we tried to price an American so USD we should have price it in Canadian we thought pricing it from a USD standpoint would be better since most of our backers came from America but since we're Canadian it actually ended up making our numbers look super extreme and due to currency fluctuations sometimes our Canadian goal would be reached but our USD one wouldn't and it made for some really confusing moments where backers weren't sure if they got the stretch goals or not but that's okay we also went to PAX West during the

campaign and I didn't actually see a huge spike from going to a convention in the middle of the campaign though we did meet a bunch of passionate fans and we got more press coverage than we ever did before which probably helped her of our visibility a few days before the dates of you know it ending but again not too much in terms of money so who knows add-ons we didn't do any of those because we wanted this kick-started to be as straightforward as possible for us I've heard of a lot of devs that you know did make more money because they had add-ons but also it was a bigger headache so you pick and choose what you want and we also had no console goals and I believe we would have had more money again if we did stretch goals for consoles perhaps but I don't know it just it we didn't want to make any mistakes with porting and we wanted to work on the base game so again kind of pick and choose what you like and we also didn't have like a $1 pledge tier with no reward we thought that would create an anchoring effect which

basically means that people when they see the rest of the stretch goals they wouldn't want to kind of back it at a higher price point okay so just a quick note it isn't just about being noticed as much as that is important impressions mean nothing without engagement so your game needs to have some actual weight to it different games may need different value points or gain trust and legitimacy in different ways either way if you're new developer on Kickstarter know that emphasizing this has weight and value so boyfriend dungeon in particular had a lot of people asking if it was just a gimmick and this makes sense right it's kind of a silly game premise and it they want to know if we made this just because we knew it would have a strong like Oh like emotional reaction we're going to be viral and then we would disappear and fade off into the distance so we had to spend a lot of time increasing our trust and like legitimacy to the community whether that was through pointing out our previous games or accepting any and all interviews about knowledge sharing our own knowledge and other games for example like 2d

platformers might have the opposite problem you might need to prove why your game is so unique and special and different from the other 2d platformers alright so how do our noticing efforts go considering the Kickstarter campaign in particular this is a super quick rundown of how our campaign went with all things considered mid campaign we're averaging about four to six thousand dollars a day which is great since normally you think we would have fetched a saturated saturated our niche after the first day but we're their mouths kept going and we kept pushing so that was wonderful here is a very large graph of our top ten referrals or in other words the places that converted the most people into pledges what I want to point out is actually our twitter which was very strange because according to our Kickstarter contact the conversion rate for twitter which is the percent of pledge column is usually less than one percent for video games our twitter alone accounts for seventeen percent which is cool you know that's where we put a lot of our efforts into so it was

nice that it turned out that way and whorfin dungeon in particular is very community oriented in comparison to our previous Kickstarter with moon hunters it did way better in terms of like social aspects so here's a comparison moon hunters Kickstarter was in 2014 and this was kind of before we were really building our communities so we only had like 12.5% making up the grand total of referrals and boyfriend dungeon is almost twice that at 23 point two eight percent so that was nearly nice and the most popular times that people visited our Kickstarter page but didn't necessarily back it was obviously in the beginning which is very cool a fast drop down because likely a lot of people saw it etc and went viral during that time but there's a little spike on August 23rd because we were featured on the front page of the Kickstarter website so that's really nice to see and of course there's a tiny spike near the end when people come in to check to see if your

Kickstarter looks like it's going to be funded or not and then they decide to throw in their money and they also get like a little email reminding them to back the game from Kickstarter if they are following it and here's our social growth further pain on the right where the call-to-actions near the top of her page and the ones with stars next to them mean they weren't directly linked on the page personally I think having social links near the top is extremely important chances are no one is going to read your entire page even I struggle to read our entire page and keep up with your updates etc so keeping so getting them on a quick and easy platform that they check often is important and know which ones you can promote the most by the way it doesn't I didn't put facebook and tumblr on there because I knew I didn't have the time for them but Twitter the newsletter and discord were really important to us so you want to know where your like quality audience is all right so we have some last-minute tips before I wrap up look at failure and learn from them often these are the ones that often the ones that make it like ours have a lot of survivorship

bias and you can learn a lot from failure we only improve parts of the boyfriend dungeon game that needed it that needed to be shown literally the rest of the game was super broken and it worked because everyone thought it looked really cool and we were really ready and then someone thought that we can make the game in six months and we could not I'm so sorry random reddit person um get brutal feedback like seriously set up an anonymous feedback forum if you really have to get like because you can show your Kickstarter page beforehand to you know some other game developers maybe who have done it before it's really valuable it really puts things into perspective but eventually it's your call you know your game the best and of course don't forget people don't read and have very little patience so you again you want that emotional reaction from everything so it's a lot of work if you're doing a Kickstarter good luck but I'm sure you can do it make sure you to get some rest you're going to be okay that's discoverability thank you

cool and I think we're doing questions now if people have them don't ask hard questions please no questions yeah before the Kickstarter or before the announcement sorry I didn't catch it both either one okay so the question was how many followers do we have before we announced I guess the Kickstarter or we announced boyfriend dungeon before we announce boyfriend dungeon I believe we were at 7,000 Twitter followers and Facebook was like 2,500 maybe I don't post on Facebook often I don't like Facebook sorry and then during the Kickstarter we

had just less than 10k followers so yeah it's we definitely had a sizable community and we also had been building up our newsletter at every convention so that's really important actually a newsletters are fantastic and we'll convert a lot of people so basically at any turning point we had we would recruit people to social media or newsletters yeah I rambled are there no more questions are we good whoo [Applause]